Bumblebees in bird box

[Lisa Romano]

I caught some movement going into my chickadee box this afternoon so I thought I'd peek inside hoping to find a bird. Instead I found a couple bumblebees - one very chunky, the other a mini version of the big one. They were walking around on the old nesting material in there paying no attention to me. I'm curious a) what they might be doing, b) if their presence might prevent chickadees from using the box, and c) would chickadees have already taken up residence if they were going to nest in there this year? I got great pleasure having some nesting chickadees last year and was hoping they'd return...

[Stephanie Hazen]

you are so lucky!!!  Bombus melanopygus bumblebee queen has chosen.  that box for her nest.  you can put up another box for the chickadee.  at our place the chickadees filled 5 boxes with moss. one was used by bumblebees, one by swallows, one by chipmunks, one by nuthatches and one by chickadees last year

Stephanie Hazen

On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 7:07 PM Lisa Romano <lisam...@gmail.com> wrote:

I caught some movement going into my chickadee box this afternoon so I thought I'd peek inside hoping to find a bird. Instead I found a couple bumblebees - one very chunky, the other a mini version of the big one. They were walking around on the old nesting material in there paying no attention to me. I'm curious a) what they might be doing, b) if their presence might prevent chickadees from using the box, and c) would chickadees have already taken up residence if they were going to nest in there this year? I got great pleasure having some nesting chickadees last year and was hoping they'd return...

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[Stephanie Hazen]

in a few weeks. look up black tailed bumblebee. 

On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 7:19 PM Lisa Romano <lisam...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm a fan of the bumblers too! I don't know anything about their nesting habits and a quick google didn't reveal much info. Should I expect to find a bunch of fledgling bumblebees in a month or two :)

[Bill Gerth]

Hi Lisa and Stephanie,

Super interesting!

Hey...did you happen to get a pic of the bees in the nest box? Could be black-tailed bumblebees, but yellow-faced bumblebees are also really common in our area and are known to sometimes take over bird nest boxes too.

Here's a link to a webpage from the California Bluebird Recovery Program in which they mention this behavoir by yellow-faced bumblebees....

https://www.cbrp.org/nest-box-monitoring/

Cheers,

Bill

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