The dead rest quietly at East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York. Beneath them, millions of bees are very much alive.
When Cornell University scientists walked through the cemetery, they made an extraordinary discovery. On a small piece of ground barely an acre and a half in size, they found roughly 5.5 million wild bees living in the soil beneath the gravestones. It is one of the largest and oldest groups of ground-nesting bees ever recorded.
These are not the honeybees that most people imagine. They are Andrena regularis, commonly called regular mining bees, and they are solitary. Each female digs her own burrow in the earth and raises her young alone. What looked like one large swarm was actually millions of separate lives, each minding her own small tunnel.
The researchers used special traps to capture the bees as they came out of the ground in spring 2023. From these samples, they estimated the total population at around 5.56 million.
Most people do not realize that roughly 70 to 75 percent of bee species actually nest in the ground, hidden underfoot. A cemetery with its open, undisturbed lawns is perfect for them.
East Lawn Cemetery was founded in 1878, which means generations of mining bees may have been digging in the same soil for over a century. These bees are valuable pollinators for apple trees and other spring crops. The discovery was published on April 13, 2026, in the journal Apidologie. The bees appear briefly in spring, do their work, and then disappear back into the earth.