by Matt Simongrist
“This story was originally published grist. Sign up for Grist Weekly newsletter here“
A miner panics at East Lawn Cemetery in Ithaca, New York. This is not the spirit of a repressed worker, Andrena regularis, also known as the regular mining bee. It is black and tan and sports patches of fuzzy, sometimes yellow color as it collects pollen. The critter is at once strange to humans and highly regular in the natural world: we might expect it to form large colonies like the honey bee, but in fact it is among 90 percent of solitary bee species. Instead of nesting in trees, it digs tunnels in the ground, hence the moniker.
Scientists at nearby Cornell University have discovered that this seemingly sterile habitat—lots of tombstones and cropped lawns—not only supports this wonderful insect. It hosts one of the largest and oldest known colonies of ground-fertilizing bees anywhere in the world.
Mine is great for bees, to be sure. But the result is also a sum A growing body of evidence that cemeteryEverywhere, it provides essential habitat for all kinds of wildlife, from insects to mammals. Bees are already under significant threat from habitat loss and pesticide use, so thoughtfully managing these final resting places can protect the pollinators we need to fertilize crops amid rising temperatures and increasingly chaotic weather. “It’s exciting to see things like this being discovered, where you find biodiversity in unexpected places,” said Christopher Grinter, collection manager of entomology at the California Academy of Sciences, who was not involved in the study. “It’s this kind of key, or this ‘aha’ moment, where it’s like: ‘Wait, not only is this happening without us noticing, we should be encouraging and nurturing this biodiversity now.'”
It’s not your fault, but you may have the wrong idea about bees. We are taught that bees live in colonies with a queen and many workers who produce honey. They are such essential flower pollinators that farmers hire hives to work their crops.
While honey bees farm the colony, their less visible colleagues also work hard. Most of them are solitary, making their homes underground or in natural cavities such as trees. For example, the regular miner bee digs holes under the eastern lawn cemetery, where it lays eggs that develop into larvae and emerge as adults the following spring. These adults become important pollinators for native plants, including the New York apple tree, a highly prized crop.
Surprisingly, a cemetery can tick many boxes for a ground-dwelling buzzer in the market for a home. If it’s a good place for people to bury their dead, it’s also a good place for regular mining bees: “Places that don’t flood and places that are easy to dig and don’t collapse when you dig,” says Jordan Kuenman, a community ecologist at Cornell University and co-author of a new book. paper Describes the results. “So we think the bees in this area are attracted to some of the same characteristics.”
But if a lawn mower grazed your home, wouldn’t you consider moving? Well, this might not be too big of a deal for the regular miner bee. In fact, by mowing down the grass, groundskeepers can benefit the insects. “They often like to keep the soil exposed,” Kuenman said. “It helps warm the soil faster, allowing them to be active more quickly during the day. It allows them to get in and out of the nest easier.”
Researchers have discovered that this population of miner bees is on the rise. By collecting individuals and scaling the counts across the grounds, they estimate that the East Lawn Cemetery contains between 3 million and 8 million bees, including species other than miners. “It was an extraordinary size, and a lot of it had to do with extraordinary density,” Kuenman said. “In some places, we were measuring thousands of individuals per square meter.” (However, adds Kuenman, gardeners can help bees even more by cutting early in the morning before the insects emerge for the day.)
Researchers could also determine if it was a healthy population because of how many females were flying around. Males are smaller than regular miner bees, so when a mother lays eggs, she has to devote fewer resources to producing male offspring. If a population has a healthy proportion of women, then, that suggests it’s thriving, and that’s exactly what scientists found in the cemetery.
Enter the miner bee’s mortal enemy, Nomada imbricata, a variety of cuckoo bees. Just as cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of other species, these opportunistic miners attack bee burrows to lay their eggs. This saves it the trouble of digging its own home and leaves its offspring with plenty of food. “Parasitic bees are evolved and often have these large mandibles that they use to swallow everything in their path, including host bees,” Kuenman said. “They’ll sometimes decapitate them.” Mine is not good for bees, obviously, but the presence of cuckoos in the cemetery is further evidence that there is a healthy population for it to parasitize.
Bees are not alone in their success in these unlikely habitats. Other scientists are finding that many species across the tree of life — bats, migrating geese, owls, coyotes, Rare types of plants — In an increasingly urbanized world, cemeteries are being used as shelters. “It has a lot of what you want,” said Seth Magel, senior director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, who was not involved in the new study. “It’s got trees, it’s got grass, it’s got potential prey species and resources for you. And then it basically lacks some of the things you don’t like about parks, which are probably people and dogs.” Also missing from the cemetery are speeding cars, which hit the United States millions of Birds and larger animals, not to mention countless numbers of insects every year.
Although cemeteries already regularly stock mine bees and other species, groundskeepers can do more to support wildlife. Reducing the use of rodenticides protects birds of prey, which die from poisoned mice and rats. Adding native plants provides food and shelter for native pollinators, helping people adapt to a changing climate. These species fertilize the greenery throughout a city, for example, Significantly reduced urban temperaturesand help farmers promote their crops. “To have flowers, to have a beautiful ecosystem or any biodiversity, we need to have pollinators that fuel the reproduction of those plants,” Grinter said.
While cities have historically been cast as destroyers of biodiversity, conservationists now take a more nuanced view, Magel said. Yes, deforestation to build cities is terrible for nature. But cities also have ways to nurture the natural world deep within. As places for the dead, ironically enough, cemeteries can mingle with the living. “What would it be like to create a world where we continue to urbanize,” Magel said, “but we do it in a way that leaves room for some of these species?”
This article originally appeared on grist A https://grist.org/cities/why-millions-of-adorable-bees-are-emerging-from-this-cemetery/.
GRIST is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
***
At The Good Men Project, we are proud to report from Syndicate gristOne of the nation’s most experienced nonprofit climate newsrooms. We value Grist not only because it covers climate change, but because it understands that climate is not an isolated issue sitting beside real life. It intersects with health, food, work, migration, infrastructure, energy, inequality and the everyday conditions that people rely on to build stable lives.
That wide lens is important to us. At The Good Men Project, we’re interested in how to live well in a rapidly changing world, and it’s increasingly impossible to ask this question honestly without asking what kind of world people are being asked to live in. Climate change is not just an environmental story. It is a human story, a system story and a moral story. It raises questions about power, responsibility, adaptation, care, and who is expected to absorb the costs when institutions fail to plan ahead. It also intersects with many of the themes we often return to, including masculinity, provision, work, family, resilience, and the pressures people face when the ground beneath ordinary life becomes less predictable. That’s one reason we’re delighted to share Grist’s work with our readers.
There are many ways to support Good Men Projectits mission. You can sign up for our newsletter, become a premium member, and follow our wide-ranging conversations about climate, culture, identity, relationships, and how to live responsibly in a rapidly changing world. We also work with authors, agencies, brands and sponsors through our author enhancement and paid guest post programs. For more information, email (email protected).
If you believe in the work we’re doing at The Good Men Project, please join us as a Premium Member today.
All premium members can watch The Good Men Project without any ads.
Need more information? A full list of benefits is here.
–
Photo credit: splash
