An East Hill Cemetery Is Home to Millions of Ground-Nesting Bees

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Editor’s note: This story was adapted from a feature in the Cornell Chronicle.

By Krishna Ramanujan

To save money, Rachel Fordyce parked her car for free at Ithaca’s East Hill Plaza and walked through East Lawn Cemetery to her job as a technician in an entomology lab on campus. One spring day in 2022, she walked in to work with a jar full of bees.

“These are all over the cemetery,” she told her boss, Bryan Danforth, a professor of entomology in CALS.

They identified the bees as Andrena regularis (also known as the “regular mining bee”), a wild, solitary, ground-nesting species that is an important pollinator.

Fordyce’s jar led to the discovery that the Ithaca cemetery is home to one of the largest and oldest recorded aggregations of ground-nesting bees in the world, with an estimated 5.5 million individual insects.

The cemetery is home to one of the largest and oldest recorded aggregations of ground-nesting bees in the world, with an estimated 5.5 million individual insects.

That’s the equivalent of more than 200 honeybee hives in a 1.5-acre plot of land, and more than three times the population of Manhattan.

“I’m sure there are other large bee aggregations that exist around the world that we just haven’t identified, but in terms of what is in the literature, this is one of the largest,” says Steve Hoge ’24, first author of a new study published in mid-April in the journal Apidologie.

The research delves into the biology of these economically important but understudied wild bees, using those at the cemetery as a case study.

“The research elevates the value of solitary ground-nesting bees and shows just how abundant these bees are, how important they are as crop pollinators, and that we need to be aware of these nest sites and preserve them,” Danforth says.

Historical bee observation data revealed that A. regularis has been collected in East Lawn Cemetery as far back as the early 1900s; the cemetery itself was founded in 1878.

The research elevates the value of solitary ground-nesting bees and shows just how abundant these bees are, how important they are as crop pollinators, and that we need to be aware of these nest sites and preserve them.

Prof. Bryan Danforth

The discovery adds credence to claims that cemeteries serve as preserves of biodiversity.

Older cemeteries, particularly in urban centers in Europe, are known to be refuges for rare plants, insects, birds, and mammals. The peacefulness, the lack of pesticides, and the fact that, overall, the ground is rarely disturbed, all make cemeteries good habitat for bees, Danforth says.

A. regularis and other ground-nesting bees are vastly understudied, even though 75% of bees are solitary ground nesters.

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“It’s the most common lifestyle for bees,” Danforth says.

When Hoge began the study, he searched the scientific literature for information on A. regularis and found the most comprehensive and useful article dated to 1978, which created an opportunity to more fully describe the bee’s biology.

Like most solitary, ground-nesting bees, female A. regularis dig subterranean nests and lay eggs in brood cells provisioned with pollen and nectar. The eggs hatch into larvae and develop into adults underground.

A. regularis and other ground-nesting bees are vastly understudied, even though 75% of bees are solitary ground nesters.

“This species overwinters as adults, which is relatively rare,” says Hoge, “and that’s part of the reason why they come up out of the ground so early in the spring, timed to the apple bloom,” as well as other fruit trees and early blooming wildflowers.

Cornell Orchards, around one-third of a mile away, provides a large resource of blooming flowers in early spring. This might partly explain the cemetery’s enormous population of A. regularis, along with the area’s sandy soil, which these bees prefer, Danforth says.

In the study, the authors employed emergence traps, which are small mesh tents that are open on the bottom and sit over less than a square meter of ground. A funnel leads to a glass jar that traps insects.

“You capture a whole community of animals coming out of the ground with this approach,” Danforth says.

The researchers set 10 traps between late March and mid-May 2023. They collected 3,251 individuals representing 16 species of bees, flies, and beetles, with A. regularis as the dominant species, according to the paper.

By counting how many bees were caught in each trap, the team calculated average bee density, or the number of bees emerging from a square meter of ground. Researchers then extrapolated that number to the total area of the cemetery, about 6,000 square meters.

This species overwinters as adults, which is relatively rare, and that’s part of the reason why they come up out of the ground so early in the spring, timed to the apple bloom.

Steven Hoge ’24

Given that different traps captured different numbers of bees, they calculated that the total population of A. regularis ranged from as few as 3 million to as many as 8 million, with an average of 5.5 million total bees.

Danforth and the team have created a global ground-nesting bee citizen science project, where people around the world can report on ground-nesting bees and aggregations they observe in their daily lives.

“These populations are huge, and they need protection,” Danforth says. “If we don’t preserve nest sites, and someone paves over them, we could lose in an instant 5.5 million bees that are important pollinators.”

Published April 16, 2026

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