A morning walk through East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York uncovered an immense colony of some 5.5 million subterranean bees. The discovery, which a Cornell University research team published in April in the journal Apidologie , documents one of the largest aggregations of these insects ever recorded in the world. The population, belonging to the species Andrena regularis , occupies an area of about 1.25 acres and is crucial for pollination of the region's orchards, demonstrating that historic cemeteries can prove unsuspected refuges for urban biodiversity. The Genesis of the Discovery It all began in the spring of 2022, when Rachel Fordyce, then a laboratory technician in Cornell University's entomology department, noticed an anomalous presence of insects during her usual walk to work. After collecting some specimens, she showed them to Bryan Danforth, an entomologist at the same university. Analysis revealed that they were Andrena regularis , commonly called the mining or miner bee.…