Are Chickadees the key to the creation of an effective Bumble Bee Nest Box? Likely, and you can help us figure this out.
Desiree Narango, a graduate student studying chickadee's in urban Washington, D.C., has found that bumble bees (likely Bombus bimaculatus) will nest in the used or abandoned moss nests of Carolina Chickadees. Approximately 1/4 of the these nests had a bumble bee nest and there is indirect evidence that the queen may actually chase chickadees out of nests during laying. The actual use rate could be higher as nests boxes were not regularly checked after determining that the nest was abandoned by the birds.
Given that no effective bumble bee nest box exists in North America this is a call to action to flesh out the possibilities of this technique.
Yesterday, Sam Droege, a native bee specialist at USGS in Maryland, and his interns gathered moss and found enough old 4" plastic pipe to make 20 nests. Today they will assemble them, load them with moss and put them outside. You should too! These experiments can help us learn more about this possibly awesome way to keep bumble bees.
You can learn how to build these PVC pipe nests from Narango's directions posted on her web site. You don't have to pre-load the nest box with wood chips as you would for a chickadee, but just load them with moss for the bees. Place them outside and monitor them. Send us your location for the nest pipes and the results (did bees nest or not?) and we'll pass all the results to Sam Droege.
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Once, years ago, I watched Bumbles carry dried grasses up to an unused kestrel box. I have to say "unused" because I hadn't seen any kestrels in the yard that year. That nest was….14 feet high?
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing that. I will note that too.
Wow, that is very neat. We have a little birdhouse in our yard that chickadees nested in last year... but it is old and kind of falling apart so maybe we should try making some new ones. Do you know if chickadees are territorial in their nesting - if we put several of these in an acre and a half lot will it mean lots of chickadee (and bee) nests or just a waste of time and one very angry chickadee pair?
or maybe more importantly, seeing that you can specifically build them for bees... are bumblebees territorial? I'd guess since we have lots of plants for them we could possibly get more than one colony. Also where does one get moss to stuff in them?
Years ago I worked on a project where researchers from Cornell were raising bumblebees (in California). it was surprisingly hard to get a bumblebee colony going in 'captivity'.
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