Wednesday, May 20, 2026

5.5 million bees in New York cemetery for World Bee Day on Wayback Wednesday

Happy World Bee Day! I'm returning to a source I haven't used since April 2025 for today's biodiversity holiday celebrating bees, Anton Petrov reporting Bizarre Discovery in NYC Cemetery Rewrites What We Know About Bees.

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about a strange discovery in a New York cemetery - bees, lots of bees
Anton may have wished this video was six months earlier or later so he could use it for Halloween, but it ended up being perfect for World Bee Day.

When I heard that this cemetary was in Ithaca (not NYC), I was expecting Cornell University to play a major role and I was not disappointed. Here are the first few paragraphs from the article/press release in the Cornell Chronicle, 5.5M ground nesting bees make home in Ithaca cemetery.
To save money, Rachel Fordyce parked her car for free at Ithaca’s East Hill Plaza and walked through East Lawn Cemetery to her job as a technician in an entomology lab on Cornell’s campus. One spring day in 2022, she walked in to work with a jar full of bees.

“These are all over the cemetery,” she told her boss, Bryan Danforth, professor of entomology in the College and Agriculture and Life Sciences. They identified the bees as Andrena regularis (also known as the "regular mining bee"), a wild, solitary, ground-nesting species that is an important pollinator.

Fordyce’s jar of bees led to the discovery that the Ithaca cemetery is home to one of the largest and oldest recorded aggregations of ground nesting bees in the world, with an estimated 5.5 million individual bees. That’s the equivalent of more than 200 honeybee hives in a 1.5-acre plot of land, and more than three times the population of Manhattan.

“I’m sure there are other large bee aggregations that exist around the world that we just haven’t identified, but in terms of what is in the literature, this is one of the largest,” said Steve Hoge ’24, first author of a new study published April 13 in the journal Apidologie. The research delves into the biology of these economically important but understudied wild bees, using those at East Lawn Cemetery as a case study. Hoge conducted the research as an undergraduate working in Danforth’s lab.

The paper describes a novel method for documenting many aspects of bee biology, reveals how such wild bees are extremely important agricultural pollinators for high-value specialty crops, such as the apples, one of New York's most iconic and valuable commodities, and points to the importance of cemeteries as preserves of biological diversity.

“The research elevates the value of solitary ground-nesting bees and shows just how abundant these bees are, how important they are as crop pollinators, and that we need to be aware of these nest sites and preserve them,” Danforth said.
This story reminds me of the one about alkali bees in 'Human Footprint' on PBS Terra reports 'This Bee Is Worth Millions (And You've Never Heard Of It)' for World Honey Bee Day. There, millions of solitary burrowing bees are responsible for pollinating alfalfa in Washington state. Here, millions of a different species of solitary burrowing bees are responsible for pollinating apples in New York. It's not just honeybees and bumblebees that keep our food system working!

Since it's Wayback Wednesday, follow over the jump for a retrospective of the most active shares about holidays on Threads.


CBS canceling 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' is enough to drive one to drink on National Daiquiri Day earned 5.3K views, 203 likes, and 7 reposts (most for all both for the year and month of July 2025).


For World AIDS Day, KPIX explains 'How HIV Research Helped Pave Way To Fight COVID-19 Pandemic' earned 1 repost (most for month and tied for second most for year) and 116 views.


Bald Eagle finally legally the national bird for American Eagle Day plus National Seashell Day on the Summer Solstice earned 1 reply to tie for most replies during year and the most during June 2025.

That's a wrap for today's post. Stay tuned for another retrospective tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy Wednesday Addams, the mascot for Wayback Wednesday.


Previous posts in this series Previous retrospectives about holidays. Previous retrospectives about top Instagram and Threads shares
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