Bees are often portrayed as hive dwellers, but in fact, around 70 percent of bees nest in the ground.
Now, a team of scientists has discovered a cluster of 5.6 million of bees under a cemetery in the state of New York, this being one of the largest and oldest ever recorded.
According to , scientists knew that one species of these bees, Regular adrenalinewas in the cemetery East Lawnin the city of Ithaca, at least since 1935 — but they had no idea how many bees lived there.
In a new one, published this Monday in Apidologyresearchers collected bees in several locations around the cemetery for a month and a half and estimated how many members A. regular they lived underground.
The group noted that more than 5 million bees emerged to forage and mate in spring 2023, in an area of about 6500 square meters.
“I was completely amazed when we did the calculations. I’ve seen published estimates of bee clusters in the hundreds of thousands. But I never really imagined there were 5.56 million bees,” says the study’s lead author, Bryan Danforth.
In another, carried out in Arizona, the authors estimated that about 1.6 million of bees Centris caesalpiniae emerged from a place of 1290 square meters in a year. In a second study, carried out in 2024, 651440 bees Melissodes bimaculatus on a suburban lawn in upstate New York.
Still in a third, approximately 13500 bees painted by Epicharis in a place of 160 square meters not Brazil.
Thus, this research points to the importance of cemeteries as a habitat for bees that nest in the ground, being considered an “exceptionally important” pollinator, says Danforth.
“Solitary bees are completely undervalued. I spend a lot of time trying to encourage people to value these insects, simply because they do so much and end up going a little unnoticed,” concludes Danforth.
Soraia Ferreira, ZAP //
