In the spring of 2022, a Cornell lab technician who'd been parking for free near an Ithaca cemetery and cutting through it on her walk to work noticed the ground was covered in bees, and brought a jarful back to her supervisor — the discovery that followed put the number of bees living beneath that one cemetery at roughly 5.5 million, more than triple the population of Manhattan.

In the spring of 2022, a Cornell lab technician who'd been parking for free near an Ithaca cemetery and cutting through it on her walk to work noticed the ground was covered in bees, and brought a jarful back to her supervisor — the discovery that followed put the number of bees living beneath that one cemetery at roughly 5.5 million, more than triple the population of Manhattan.

In the spring of 2022, Rachel Fordyce, a technician in Cornell University’s entomology lab, had been parking for free at Ithaca’s East Hill Plaza and cutting through nearby East Lawn Cemetery on her walk to campus, a detail later recounted in Cornell’s alumni magazine. She’d noticed the ground was covered in small, dark bees, thousands of them, moving in and out of tiny holes in the bare soil between the headstones. Rather than walk past it agai…