Weird News: The Cemetery Bees of New York #weirdnews #cemeterylovers

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Today's weird news is brought to you by cemetery bees. Yeah, I said cemetery bees. Researchers at Cornell University discovered more than 5 million bees living in the East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York. Now, 90% of these are solitary bees, which are the bees that do not live in hives. They live alone, usually in a hole in the ground in a cemetery. The discovery was accidental.

[00:00:22]A lab tech parked in the cheap lot to save money and discovered the bees because she took a shortcut through the cemetery on her walk to work. Why do the bees like the cemetery? Because the ground is relatively undisturbed unless someone's getting buried. Now, this is one of the largest colonies of solitary bees ever discovered on record. Now, most of them are mining bees. Mining bees are very important pollinators.

[00:00:44]Now, these cemetery bees emerge by the millions from their homes in the ground every spring and immediately head next door to the orchard for lunch. Now, what are these bees doing the rest of the year? They're just hanging in the cemetery with everybody's late Mimas and papas having a good time. Apparently, they've been doing that since 1878.