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…
