A discovery near the Cornell University campus has researchers buzzing.
It all started when a Cornell lab technician walked through the East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca on her way to work and came across an aggregation of bees.
Entomology professor Bryan Danforth said when he and his colleagues checked it out, they found an impressive sight.
"I want you to imagine just a cloud of bees flying between one and two feet above the ground," he said.
Researchers found an estimated 5.5 million ground nesting bees over a 1.5 acre area of the cemetery. To put that in perspective, that's about four times the human population of Manhattan, and the bees have a combined biomass equivalent to about two adult giraffes.
Danforth said finding a nesting site that large allows entomologists excellent access to the bees' biology.
"We can understand their patterns of foraging. We can understand their host-parasite relationships. We can understand their mating behavior. We can understand their nest architecture," he said.
Danforth said this type of bee, the Andrena Regularis, is not aggressive, and it doesn't sting. It also plays an important role in the local economy.
"We find this bee very commonly in apple orchards," said Danforth. "In fact, it's one of the most important apple orchard pollinators, based on our 15 years of surveying the wild bees of apple orchards."
And as bee populations are dwindling worldwide, Danforth said he sees it as poetic that these bees are turning to a local cemetery for refuge. Those areas tend to have low pesticide use, and researchers believe the bees are attracted to the types of soil in historical cemeteries.
"These bees are kind of like, they're emerging from this cemetery. It's a rebirth story. It's a nice circle of life story."
Danforth said researchers are on the lookout for similar bee aggregations to help with conservation efforts. They're encouraging bee enthusiasts to participate in "Project Ground Nesting Bee" and report their findings at gnbee.org.
