Bizarre Discovery in NYC Cemetery Rewrites What We Know About Bees

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]So, this would have been a perfect Halloween video except that I guess I couldn't hold it and had to talk about this sooner. And that's because today we're going to start with a cemetery kind of like a real one in New York. And usually people go to cemeteries to find some peace and quiet and possibly spend time with their loved ones who passed away or maybe to stay away from the living just because life can get pretty hectic in a typical city. And sometimes, if this is a horror movie, there's also a zombie infestation. But all jokes aside, something absolutely mind-blowing has recently been discovered in one of the cemeteries in New York. And it's actually something that literally nobody expected and to some extent provide us with just a little bit of good news when it comes to nature. And so, hello wonderful person. This is Anton. Today we're going to discuss some really mind-blowing discoveries coming from this somotypical New York cemetery referred to as the East Lone Cemetery in Etha. And no, it's not zombies. Here, science has discovered these little guys, bees. But not like one or two or even a hundred. They've discovered 5.5 million bees. Literally making this their new home. because turns out there is a massive underground city that was recently discovered here and instead of being a city of undead and zombies.

[00:01:28]Okay, I'm sorry. I'm going to stop. So, yeah, instead of being some kind of a unusual city, this is a city of bees that literally nobody knew existed and literally nobody expected to exist because we actually did not think bees were even capable of making this happen.

[00:01:42]And by itself, this is a profound discovery because in this case, in this video at least, you're also going to discover that bees, or at least bees as we know them, don't actually usually come in the form that produces honey that we consume. In other words, the honey bees we're used to, only represent a smaller fraction of total bees on the entire planet. And so here, this actually challenges what most of us think we know about bees. It also challenges what we know about their habitation. And it essentially reveals this somewhat bizarre world that we never knew existed under our feet. And by the way, this is just the first discovery. This seems to exist in many locations on the planet and usually in cemeteries. We'll discuss why in a few minutes. And so here, let's start the story with a bit of a walk here. Rachel Fores, one of the technicians at the Cornell University lab, was walking through the East Lawn Cemetery back in 2022. And she was mostly doing this to save money on parking. And while she was walking here, she noticed something somewhat strange. The entire ground in the cemetery was actually crawling with bees in numbers she hasn't seen before.

[00:02:48]And so she decided to collect some of them in a jar and brought them back in the lab to discuss this with Professor Brian Denforth, one of the main researchers from the recent study were discussing. But pretty quickly they discovered that this was not your typical honeybee, but instead a species referred to as Andrina regularis, commonly known as the regular mining bee from the family of Andreida. And what makes these bees different from what we're used to or basically those social bees we usually think of when we think of bees, is actually the fact that they're not social. Unlike honeybees which are usocial living in highly organized colonies, mining bees are entirely solitary. And so here every single female is its own queen.

[00:03:32]Basically it has its own tiny kingdom.

[00:03:35]And in comparison in a typical honeybee colony, there is one queen, thousands of workers, and of course additional bees inside the colony. But in the mining bees life, a single female does pretty much everything. She builds the nest.

[00:03:49]She forages for food. She lays the eggs and she then feeds her young. And so there's no royalty class here. There's actually no class at all because the mother does everything. Hey, that's kind of like my mom back in the days. And so basically, once the male bee mates with the female, his role officially ends and the female spends her relatively short adult life, usually lasting just a few weeks, ensuring the next generation survives. But as you can see from this image, they do actually resemble a typical honeybee quite a lot. As a matter of fact, just like honey bees, they also produce honey. But these solitary bees do not produce surplus honey for us to harvest. And that's because once again, they don't live in a colony. So they only have to take care of their young. And even though they do collect nectar and pollen and produce honey in exactly the same way, instead of depositing honey inside the wax here, they mix it into a little bowl to then feed it to the larvae inside these underground cities. And while the main difference between honey bees and these mining bees is actually in their habitat. Most colony bees seem to prefer to live in various hives or hollow trees and are basically aerial. But mining bees, as the name implies, prefer to dig underground barrels consisting of the main vertical shaft and several offshooting chambers, very similar to a typical antill. And each of these chambers contains a bowl of pollen and a nectar, usually referred to as beeb bread. And it's actually here and specifically inside this beeb bread that the mining bee then lays its eggs. And after this, it basically seals the chamber with a waterproof secretion that she paints into the walls. In other words, she completely seals away her future larva because it's essentially just going to survive by consuming this bee bread. But the thing is, even though technically they are solitary, they're also sort of gregarious. As a matter of fact, you might see hundreds and sometimes thousands of mounds in a single patch of lawn which are basically kind of like their neighborhood and in some sense form these B cities. And so even though you would not call this a true colony, this is a kind of a bee neighborhood where each of these individual mothers choose to coexist in because it seems to be a kind of a prime real estate. But here's the important part. Like I mentioned, even though most of us assume that most bees are these aerial bees or honey bees, in reality, 70 to possibly 80% of all bees worldwide are actually these solitary ground nesters. In other words, the majority of bees in the world are not honeybees and are not social. Instead, they seem to be these solitary mothers. And because of this, there are also some individual differences and even physical differences because of their lifestyles.

[00:06:33]So, for example, for these mining bees, since they don't have massive hives or the queen to protect, they're also incredibly non-aggressive and almost never attack. And even though they can sting you if you squeeze them, even their stinger is usually too weak to penetrate human skin. They also have no guard bees that would protect the typical hive. And so, basically, when you see one, they're actually usually extremely passive. On top of this, even though they're technically smaller than honeybees, they seem to contain very dense, feathery hairs that actually makes them ridiculously important. And so, here's where we come to this most important part of all of this. Compared to typical honeybees, mining bees are actually excellent pollinators. Because of this excessive hair, they actually collect a lot more pollen when visiting flowers and essentially resemble something like this even after a single visit. And that means that when it comes to pollination, they seem to be the primary pollinators for a lot of locations in many different regions. And so for at least some plants and some trees, they seem to be way more efficient in terms of pollination as this particular study discovered and as we're going to discuss very soon.

[00:07:43]Because first, let's briefly talk about exactly what scientist discovered in this New York cemetery. Because following this initial discovery back in 2022, researchers decided to use what's known as the emergence traps to try to capture some of these insects and to then estimate how many exist in this region. And so between March and May 2023, the traps collected 3,200 individuals across 16 species of various mining bees with the Andrina regularis being the most dominant species. And by using this number, they then modeled how many bees seem to be present in the entire cemetery, discovering that there seem to be at least 5.5 million members, which is three times as much as the population of Manhattan. But importantly, by using historical records, they also determined that this bee population existed at this site since the early 1900s. And so, this seems to be a very stable and a very long-term habitat for at least some of the species of these bees. But even more importantly, they seem to be directly connected to various apple orchards in this region. And so here, scientists discovered that these bees seem to be incredibly efficient at pollinating fruit trees and especially apples. And since in New York, which is also known as the big apple, apples are a massive industry. Technically, these bees should now be the state animal. And so this study notes that a lot of these mining bees seem to emerge from the ground in April, exactly when temperatures reached the point where the apple trees start to bloom. And the nearby Cornell orchard 600 m away seemed to be directly pollinated by most of these bees and involved more mining bees than honeybees coming from nearby farms. And this is a huge discovery because it actually tells us that our previous assumptions about honeybees and various pollinators were a little bit incorrect. mostly because it looks like these solid rabies are just so much better at pollination, especially because pollen seems to stay dry and powdery when attached to their bodies. And so it falls off and pollinates the next flower much easier.

[00:09:49]And so quite a few different plants like apples, cherries, and blueberries have been discovered to be pollinated mostly by these types of bees, not honeybees as previously assumed. And that of course means that they possess an enormous agricultural importance. Something that was literally unknown until this relatively recent study that basically started with a walk-in cemetery. And additionally, the study also reveals a somewhat complex miniature ecosystem because here it doesn't just involve mining bees. Other insects have also evolved and join in to take advantage of all of this with for example a number of cuckoo bees from the genus Numa sort of using this for their own benefits. And these bees are basically like the pirates of the bee world. They even kind of look like pirates too. And that's because they technically have a cliptopic lifestyle. They don't actually build their own nests or collect pollen and instead sneak into other nests and then lay their eggs inside. kind of like the cuckoo bird, which is why they're known as the cuckoo bees. And so once the mining bee finishes provisioning it cell with food, they then sneak into the same nest, place their own egg and run away. And when the cuckoo bee larva hatches, it usually kills the host larvae and eats all of the stored food.

[00:11:05]And on top of this, they even discovered certain types of beetles, specifically blister beetles or lita, which also emerged from the site as well, suggesting that it might be the other parasite of the bees. But exactly how it's doing this is currently unknown.

[00:11:20]Which basically means that this particular cemetery in New York has this really massive ecosystem that seems to have developed successfully for one simple reason. It's a cemetery. And so the next question is, okay, so why cemeteries? Why exactly would these bees choose a cemetery of all places? Well, it turns out that based on some other research, cemeteries are often sentinels of biodiversity. Mostly because they're usually very quiet, very peaceful, there's no pavement, there's no construction, and there are very often no pesticides. And simply because in most cultures, you're supposed to respect the dead. And well, by association, it's actually the dead that are now protecting the living ecosystem above them. And because the soil in cemeteries is very rarely disturbed, it also provides a very stable home for generations of bees, which they've been doing for decades and decades. And so this aggregation in Eithaca has likely been there for at least a century, but possibly longer. And something very similar has also been discovered in separate locations, usually involving cemeteries or untouched and undisturbed lawns, with most of these locations containing hundreds of thousands of bees and sometimes over a million. With this research pointing out the unusual importance of cemeteries as a habitat for many ground nesting bees and especially important for pollinating bees, which is actually a kind of an ironic discovery here. We had this discussion and talk about a potential bee apocalypse. Yet, turns out quite a few bees have been surviving for quite a while and doing exceptionally well in locations that people tend to respect a little bit more and disturb a little bit less. And so definitely quite an incredible discovery. But I guess in the end, so what have we learned from all of this? Well, first of all, we now know that there could be some kind of a bustling metropolis involving millions of different bees living in locations that we kind of take for granted, but very rarely visit. And we've also learned that most bees in the world are not social and don't live in colonies, but actually prefer to live in complete solitude. On top of this, we've also learned that in terms of pollination, it's really these solitary bees that seem to play the biggest role. And so even though honey bees are also important for producing honey, the process of pollination is actually done much better by someone that most of us have not been aware of until recently.

[00:13:47]And so next time you walk around a cemetery, maybe keep your eyes on the ground because you might be actually stepping on someone's house or possibly even walking over a city of millions millions individual solitary bees. But we'll definitely come back and talk about this in some of the future videos because this is a really cool discovery.

[00:14:05]Until then, thank you for watching.

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[00:14:20]I'll see you tomorrow and as always, bye-bye.

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