Massive underground bee colony with 5.5 million bees found beneath cemetery

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Okay, so this is seriously cool. Researchers at Cornell University just found a HUGE bee colony – like, one of the biggest ever – right under a cemetery in Ithaca, New York. They’re estimating around 5.5 million bees are down there! It’s pretty wild to think about that many bees living right beneath our feet.

That is more than three times the population of Manhattan, packed into just 1.5 acres of ground.

In spring 2022, a Cornell lab technician named Rachel Fordyce stumbled upon something unexpected. While taking a shortcut through a cemetery to avoid parking fees, she noticed some unusual bee activity and collected a sample to show her supervisor.

A century underground undisturbed

Records show the bat colony has lived in the cemetery since the early 1900s – for over a century without being disturbed.

The Cornell Chronicle reported that her supervisor, Bryan Danforth, identified the bees as Andrena regularis, also known as mining bees. These are solitary bees, meaning they build their own nests underground instead of living in colonies like honeybees.

From March to May 2023, the team set up ten small, net-like traps throughout the cemetery to collect bees as they left their underground nests.

Okay, so we used a bunch of traps to count the creatures, but each one gave us a different number. Because of that, we couldn’t just pick one total. Instead, we figured the population was somewhere between three and eight million. After doing the math, we landed on an average of 5.5 million – that seems like the most likely number.

Cemeteries provide a great environment for wildlife because the ground isn’t often dug up and very few pesticides are used. East Lawn Cemetery is also conveniently located near Cornell Orchards, ensuring bees have plenty of food each spring.

These bee populations are massive and require our help to thrive. According to Danforth, destroying their nesting areas – for example, by building on them – could immediately wipe out 5.5 million vital pollinators.

Strange things involving bees have been reported before. For example, in 2025, a Canadian beekeeper experienced a bizarre incident where thousands of bees swarmed their shop and stole honey, and it took four days to get the situation under control.

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2026-05-30 18:48