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News — Around the world and throughout history, humans have both feared and venerated the passing of life. Death occupies a unique space in our cultural milieu, with customs varying across people and time. Many traditions have annual celebrations of remembrance like Dia de los Muertos or the Tomb Sweeping Festival (Qingming); others sit shiva or even hire professional mourners to mark the immediate passing of loved ones. But humans are not the only species to innovate death’s doorstep: both the birds and the bees have their own cultures surrounding death, whether human or their own kind. In new research presented at the annual meeting of Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in Atlanta, GA, two independent researchers are discovering just how interesting life after death can actually be.

Making Mary Shelley proud, it seems that urban birds are taking advantage of cemeteries in the United States as newfound places to thrive. Sarah Foltz, an Associate Professor at Radford University in Virginia, has been studying how birds use graveyards as refuges for their daily life. Within cities, graveyards are almost nature-like spaces, where people go but are seldom disruptive, and offer a wide range of animals necessary footholds in urban areas. “Cemeteries are spaces for living things as much as they are for the dead” says Sarah, as she has surveyed many cemeteries around Roanoke, VA to understand how birds are using different types of headstones to hunt for food. Although still underway, her research is discovering that our final resting grounds actually provide happy meals for a diverse number of bird species that can make use of structures like headstones not found in the surrounding city. Of course, not all graveyards are the same. Cemeteries have different cultural norms and histories, like older cemeteries littered with Victorian statues, or military cemeteries that have standardized plots and frequent upkeep. Moving forward, Radford plans to survey more types of cemeteries with such extreme differences to understand how they differ in their ability to protect local wildlife while honoring our deceased.

And it seems like humans aren’t the only social species to honor their dead either, at least according to new work by graduate student Stephanie Yiru Zhu at the University of Washington. Stephanie works with bumblebees, the larger, fuzzier cousins to the more familiar honey bee, and who live in much smaller colonies compared to their gregarious relatives. But a colony, like a city, is a defined space for the living to eat, work, and grow their lives. So what happens when a bumblebee or bumble bee larvae dies? Stephanie sought to answer this question by recording videos of individual bees as they interact with the dead in artificial colonies, allowing her to peer inside this bustling bug metropolis, where her preliminary observations have revealed a hidden world of undertakers. Although we expect it amongst other vertebrates like elephants and whales who mourn the passing of groupmates, Zhu was surprised to see how attentive even less-social insects like bumblebees are to the presence of the dead. “Invertebrates have care and attention to dead bodies,” she says, after observing that worker bees removed dead larvae from the colony, placing them near their artificial sugar feeders and away from the nest. Other workers might remove up to a quarter of their deceased sisters, although to where is a mystery at this stage. She also saw bees using their antennae to smell dead colony-mates and observed one bee sitting by a dead nest-mate for hours. Only time will tell just how prevalent these undertaking behaviors are, and what function they have in maintaining the health of a bee colony.

From humans to bees, social species mark the passing of life in myriad ways. We allocate whole portions of living spaces to the dead, an for bees, their mysteries are just beginning to be revealed. But these behaviors are also signs of something new. Sarah has seen baby birds or, “fledgies following Mom around” suggesting they safely nest in our hallowed grounds, paving the way for the next generation.