5.5 million bees were living under a cemetery lawn — and nobody knew

A lab technician walking through an Ithaca, New York cemetery on her way to work noticed the ground seemed alive with bees. Cornell researchers came back the next spring with traps and counted what emerged from just 1.5 acres of lawn: an estimated 5.5 million native, ground-nesting bees — possibly the largest aggregation of its kind ever documented. Entomologist Bryan Danforth's team found these quiet neighbours are heavy lifters: a single native bee can move about four times as much pollen as a honeybee. The cemetery, it turns out, had been an accidental sanctuary — unmown corners and undisturbed soil doing conservation work no one designed.

SDG 15 · Life on land