There are more than 5.6 million bees in the New York cemetery

Researchers have known that bees have appeared in East Lawn Cemetery, Ithaca, New York state since 1935, but no one knows exactly how many individuals live.

A team of Cornell University experts decided to collect bees at many points around the cemetery for about 45 days in 2023, to determine the number of bees nesting underground.

The results showed that the density of bees living in this cemetery was “unusually high”, with about 5.56 million bees “arousal”, that is, coming out of the ground to feed and mate, in an area of ​​about 6,500 m2, the research team wrote in an article published on April 13 in the journal Apidology.

Experts say a normal honey bee colony has only about 30,000 individuals. On apple farms, each hectare usually has only about two to three bee colonies.

“When I finished the calculation, I was really stunned. I had seen estimates of the number of bees concentrated at several hundred thousand in this cemetery, but never thought the number was 5.56 million,” said Bryan Danforth, the entomology professor leading the study.

Experts say that East Lawn Cemetery is an extremely ideal ecological environment for bees, because the sandy soil here is rarely disturbed, no pesticides are used, and is located less than 1 km from the Cornell Orchards fruit nursery, which provides a huge source of pollen every early spring.

This is one of the largest bee populations ever recorded in the United States, and is also the oldest. The US National Wildlife Federation (NWF) said that about 98% of native bee species in the US live alone, not in groups, of which 70% are ground-nesting bees.