A woman walking to work in Ithaca noticed some bees. There were 5 million of them

Happy Monday and welcome to June. I don't know about you but I feel like May flew by, and I'm ready for a new month. Today's issue is a good one to start it with.

We have a story about what happens when someone pays attention on their morning walk to work, and the answer is five million bees. We have owls nesting in the ruins of an English coal mine that closed half a century ago. A restaurant in Louisville that gives every single dollar of profit away, because its owner decided that was the point. And a woman who went to Arkansas in the middle of grief and came home with a 3-carat diamond she found in the dirt.

Here's your good news.

—Stephanie S

Happy Monday and welcome to June. I don't know about you but I feel like May flew by, and I'm ready for a new month. Today's issue is a good one to start it with.

We have a story about what happens when someone pays attention on their morning walk to work, and the answer is five million bees. We have owls nesting in the ruins of an English coal mine that closed half a century ago. A restaurant in Louisville that gives every single dollar of profit away, because its owner decided that was the point. And a woman who went to Arkansas in the middle of grief and came home with a 3-carat diamond she found in the dirt.

Here's your good news.

👉 P.S. Want good news in your inbox every weekday? You can upgrade to receive Good News Break five days a week for $5 per month or $45 per year.

—Stephanie S

Rachel Fordyce used to park near Cornell and walk through East Lawn Cemetery on her way to the entomology lab. One spring morning in 2022 she noticed bees emerging from the ground in dense clusters across the sandy soil. She collected a few in a jar and brought them to her supervisor, professor Bryan Danforth. "These are all over the cemetery," she told him. That casual observation led to one of the most remarkable bee discoveries in scientific history.

The insects were identified as Andrena regularis, the regular mining bee, a solitary ground-nesting species that pollinates crops and wild plants. Using emergence traps placed across the cemetery between March and May, researchers calculated a population of somewhere between 3 and 8 million bees, with a central estimate of 5.5 million, one of the largest aggregations ever documented anywhere in the world. Historical records show the colony has been there since at least the early 1900s, thriving undisturbed in pesticide-free sandy soil for more than a century.

For scale: 5.5 million bees equals more than 200 honeybee hives and exceeds Manhattan's entire human population more than threefold. Cornell Orchards, a third of a mile away, likely helps sustain them with abundant spring flowers.

Danforth's message is clear: if nest sites like this one aren't identified and protected, millions of crucial pollinators could be lost in an instant to a single development decision. "These populations are huge, and they need protection," he said. Read the full study and see the photos of the colony emerging from the ground.

The Chatterley Whitfield mine in Staffordshire was the largest coal mine in its area and the first in the UK to produce a million tons of coal in a single year. It closed in 1976. The pit head wheels that once lowered miners underground are still standing. So are the great brick towers and industrial buildings. But look closer and the wildflowers are growing through the cracks, and barn owls and short-eared owls are nesting in the high windows and rafters, using the derelict structures as lookout posts to hunt.

Andrew Mason is a photographer whose father John worked at Chatterley Whitfield in the 1960s. With permission from Stoke-on-Trent's City Council, he set up a blind in the old colliery and spent time observing unnoticed. What he documented was extraordinary. Barn owls gliding silently past rusting headgear. Short-eared owls roosting in empty industrial windows. Wild strawberries growing on old coal slag heaps.

"The colliery is a living example of rewilding," Mason said. "You can literally see nature taking it back from the industrialized world." He plans to set up trail cameras next to document the badgers and foxes also known to be living there. The site has 15 listed buildings and sits on Historic England's heritage register. A ghost of industry becoming a sanctuary. See the stunning photos of owls among the ruins.

Adam Ursprung has owned a Steak 'n Shake down the road from his new restaurant for years. He knows how to run a food business. Then one Sunday in church he felt what he describes as a calling to serve something greater than meals. He opened Noah's Kitchen in Brownsboro Crossing outside Louisville, Kentucky, with a simple and radical commitment: 100% of profits go to charity. Every dollar, after rent and employees and expenses are covered, goes out the door to local nonprofits and ministries.

In its first year, Noah's Kitchen has donated over $100,000. Hope Rescued received $44,907. Camberwell Grief Sanctuary received $12,620. The Prisoner's Hope received $9,340. Sunrise Children's Services received $8,044. Dozens of other organizations received between $1,000 and $4,000 each. The food is what Ursprung calls elevated comfort food, and the community has shown up for it.

"When I stopped clinging to my money and started giving it away, my heart grew exponentially," he told WDRB News. "It's bringing me more happiness and peace than I ever dreamed of." His one-year anniversary is June 18th. He believes Noah's Kitchen is just getting started. Read the full story and find out how to visit or support Noah's Kitchen.

Keshia Smith planned her trip to Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas a year ago, before any of what happened had happened. By the time she arrived with her boyfriend and brother, she had lost her son six months earlier and had just buried her father the week before they left Pennsylvania. She went anyway. She needed to.

Crater of Diamonds is the only public diamond site in the world where you can keep what you find. You pay a small entry fee, walk out onto a plowed volcanic field, and dig. Keshia was digging when she spotted something catching the light. It was white, smooth, and heart-shaped. She held it up. It was a 3.09-carat diamond, the second-largest found at the park this year. Park staff verified it at the Diamond Discovery Center.

She named it the Za'Novia Liberty Diamond, honoring her grandchildren and the significance of America's 250th anniversary year. When asked what it looked like when she first saw it, she didn't hesitate. "To me it looks like a heart," she said. "That's the first thing I saw when I found it." Park officials called the discovery meant to be. "Moments like this remind us why Crater of Diamonds State Park is such a special place." Read the full story and see the photo of Keshia holding her diamond.

👨‍👦 USA: A major analysis of Census data found that college-educated fathers are now spending six fewer paid work hours per week compared to pre-pandemic levels, redirecting that time to childcare and housework in what researchers are calling the most significant shift in fatherhood behavior in a generation.

🦎 Kenya: Trail cameras set up in the Maasai Mau forest have captured photos of mountain bongos, one of Africa's most critically endangered antelopes, in an area where they were thought to be locally extinct, offering conservationists genuine hope for the species' recovery in a key habitat.

🔋 China: The world's largest grid-scale sodium-ion battery storage facility is now operating in China, part of a rapidly growing industry that could soon offer a cheaper and more abundant alternative to lithium batteries for everything from electric vehicles to home energy storage.

🪐 Global: The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that a gas giant planet called WASP-94A b has an atmosphere so extreme that silicate rock particles form clouds and then rain down as molten stone, a discovery that is reshaping scientists' understanding of planetary weather across the universe.

🪑 UK: A British designer has spent decades training living trees to grow into the shapes of chairs, tables, and lamps, and Britain's first furniture orchard is now producing fully grown pieces that require no cutting, no glue, and no nails, raising profound questions about what sustainable manufacturing could look like.

In the spring of 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were in the middle of their famous Bed-In for Peace at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, spending a week in bed to protest the Vietnam War while the world's press photographed them. When a reporter asked what he was trying to accomplish, Lennon answered without hesitation: all we are saying is, give peace a chance. He liked the phrase so much he decided to set it to music, right there in room 1742.

On June 1st, 57 years ago today, they rented an 8-track tape machine and recorded the song while still in bed. The session included Timothy Leary, Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, Petula Clark, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, and dozens of others, many of whom are mentioned in the lyrics. Tommy Smothers played acoustic guitar alongside Lennon while everyone joined in for the chorus. The result was Lennon's first solo single, released under the name Plastic Ono Band. It became an anthem heard at peace marches around the world within weeks of its release, and it has never really stopped being sung since. Room 1742 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel has been their most frequently requested room every year since.

Other notable June 1 events:

1868: The Treaty of Bosque Redondo was signed between the US government and the Navajo nation, allowing the Navajo to return to their ancestral lands from the squalid conditions of the Bosque Redondo Reservation, a rare moment in US history where Native people successfully reclaimed their homeland after forced removal. Today, the Navajo nation has 400,000 members, the largest federally registered tribal community in the country.

1937: Morgan Freeman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, going on to win an Academy Award for Million Dollar Baby and appear in some of the most beloved films of his generation. His films have earned over $4.3 billion in total worldwide receipts. He turns 88 today.

1974: The Heimlich maneuver for saving choking victims was published in the journal Emergency Medicine, giving ordinary people a life-saving technique so effective it has since rescued hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, including several US presidents.

1990: President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed a landmark pact to end chemical weapons production and begin destroying both nations' stockpiles, a historic step toward a safer world that was eventually joined by 150 other countries in 1993.

— Confucius

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🌊 Rivers Are Coming Back: Dozens of major rivers including the Seine in Paris, the Hudson in New York, and the Clyde in Glasgow have recovered from industrial pollution to support fish, swimmers, and wildlife for the first time in generations, proving that water systems can heal faster than anyone expected.

🧠 Treating Addiction: New medications and brain stimulation therapies are achieving remission rates for alcohol and opioid dependence that were considered impossible a decade ago, giving millions of people a genuine path out of one of the most persistent public health crises of the modern era.

🌺 Saving Seeds: The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway now holds nearly 1.4 million seed samples from almost every country on earth, the most comprehensive backup of agricultural diversity ever assembled, protecting thousands of plant varieties from extinction so future generations can still feed themselves.

🛰️ Watching Over the Planet: Satellite technology now allows scientists to monitor deforestation, illegal fishing, volcanic activity, and glacier retreat in real time from space, giving conservationists and governments tools to catch environmental destruction before it becomes irreversible.

🧬 Designer Cells: Researchers can now engineer living cells to perform specific tasks in the body, from attacking cancer tumors to sensing glucose and releasing insulin automatically, turning biology itself into programmable medicine that is already saving lives in early clinical trials.

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