Habitat Fit for a Queen Bumble Bee
How one Wisconsin couple turned their yard into a haven for vulnerable queen bumble bees
- Text and photos by Anne Readel
- Habitat Gardening
- Mar 26, 2026
In summer 2025, a new lemon cuckoo bumble bee queen feeds on native anise hyssop in Judy Cardin and Bob Plamann’s yard. Belonging to the genus Bombus, North America’s bumble bees are native to the continent.
ON A WARM SPRING MORNING, a queen bumble bee digs her way out of the ground. She grooms away dirt, shakes her wings and pauses to orient herself after months of hibernation. To survive and pass on her genes, she must find energy-rich nectar to fuel her body, locate a safe place to establish her nest and gather enough protein-rich pollen to feed her first brood—all within just a few weeks of emerging.
Those early days are dangerous and unforgiving. The queen is exposed to cold and rain, vulnerable to predators and threatened by dwindling fat reserves at a time when nectar-producing flowers are scarce. “Spring is a really precarious time for bumble bees because the queen is a single mom at that point, and she’s taking all the risks,” says Heather Holm, a pollinator conservationist and author of several books on native bees and other pollinators.
Food shortages, predators and bad weather aren’t the queen’s only challenges. Nest sites—abandoned rodent burrows, cavities in rock walls and under logs, brush or grass—also are limited, and queens compete for the few available spots. “There aren’t enough good nesting sites out there,” says University of Minnesota entomologist Elaine Evans.
Such realities have shaped how Judy Cardin and her husband, Bob Plamann, manage their own yard in Madison, Wisconsin. Volunteers with the Wisconsin Bumble Bee Brigade, a project that monitors the insects’ populations, the retired couple has been working to turn their property into a habitat that supports native bumble bees, especially queens, by replacing nonnative plants with natives and shrinking the area devoted to turfgrass. (The garden was designated a Certified Wildlife Habitat® by the National Wildlife Federation in 2023.) “I realized that the difference that I wanted to make in my life, and the change that I wanted to be part of, I could do in my very own yard,” Cardin says.
Their work isn’t finished. In 2025, Cardin and Plamann added 1,000 more native plants to the 20,000 their property already supported. Today, more than 75 percent of the quarter-acre yard is filled with more than 300 native species.
In shady areas, the couple has planted spring ephemerals, such as Dutchman’s breeches, Virginia bluebells, eastern waterleaf and shooting star, along with shrubs like American plum and currants. These early-blooming plants give queens the food they need for themselves and their first brood, which typically hatches in late May through June.
Cardin and Plamann also provide places for queens to nest and find shelter. In addition to needing nest sites, queens tuck themselves under leaves and brush to rest and avoid challenging weather. In the couple’s yard, chipmunks, for example, are welcome, because their tunnels act as ready-made nurseries for queens and their broods. Spent vegetation is left where it falls. “We’re not at war with nature in our yard,” Cardin says.
She also helps others understand how to support queens. The first weekend in May, Cardin hosts an event called “Cookies and Queens,” inviting the public into her yard to watch queens forage among ephemerals and search for nest sites.
Cardin sees the gatherings as a chance to share how simple choices can improve the odds for bumble bee queens. “This last year there were close to 75 or 100 people that came during the course of the event,” Cardin says. “And every one of them was there because they were thrilled to meet a bumble bee queen.”
If a queen survives spring and successfully finds a nest site, her first workers emerge by early summer. Beginning then, and through the end of the season, the queen stays underground laying eggs and running the colony. Her worker daughters take over foraging food for the growing colony. This is the time of year when most gardeners start to notice bumble bees zipping among their flowers.
Because bumble bee colonies grow rapidly, a steady supply of summer-blooming flowers is essential. Cardin and Plamann comply, with a yard that brims with bee balm, purple coneflower, Culver’s root and joe-pye weed to support the developing colony.
While bumble bee nests aren’t necessarily rare, people rarely see them hidden underground or beneath dense grass. Gardeners usually encounter a nest by accident while weeding or tidying. If you do find a nest, there’s no need to worry because bumble bees rarely cause problems, Evans says. “They really just need a few feet of space around them to be left alone.”
As summer transitions to fall, the colony reaches its peak. The queen shifts from raising workers to producing males and future queens, called gynes. These new queens are the only individuals who overwinter to carry the species forward the following spring.
That’s why the period from early August through fall is an important time to grow late-blooming flowers, Holm says. “If [the new queens] don’t build up enough fat stores, they simply won’t survive their winter hibernation.”
With that in mind, Cardin and Plamann have filled their yard with a riot of goldenrods, asters, blazing star, turtlehead, hyssop, blue sage, great blue lobelia and gentian—plants that bloom late and offer sustenance to new queens. (See NWF’s Native Plant Finder for species native where you live and purchase plants through Garden for Wildlife. Find out which plants are bumble bee favorites.)
Cardin loves sitting in her garden this time of year and watching the new queens—which are often two to four times the size of workers—feeding with special urgency. They have only a few short weeks to bulk up, mate and then vanish underground as their mothers did the year before.
When frost hits the last flowers, most male, female worker and original queen bumble bees have died. But tucked a few inches beneath soil and leaf litter, the new queens slumber—each one carrying the future of her colony. To help ensure these queens survive the long Wisconsin winter, Cardin and Plamann leave their fall leaves on the ground, resist the urge to tidy until springtime and keep the soil as undisturbed as possible.
What we choose to do—or not do—in our gardens each fall helps decide whether queens will rise again to start the next generation in spring, says Cardin. “Our own yards can make a difference.” See more photos in the slideshow below.
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Resting between practice flights, a newly hatched rusty patched bumble bee queen perches on vegetation close to her nest in Kenosha, Wisconsin. It was only the fifth nest of this federally endangered species found in the state during the past two decades. Discovered in a wooded backyard, the nest had been tucked into an abandoned rodent burrow covered with leaves.
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Inside a red-belted bumble bee nest built atop a woodpile in a Madison, Wisconsin, garden shed, female worker bees tend to developing pupae surrounding an obviously larger, newly hatched queen. Once the workers die, the new queen will overwinter underground and build her own nest next spring.
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A newly emerged queen two-spotted bumble bee feeds on Dutchman’s breeches in Madison, Wisconsin. Such early-blooming spring flowers are critical: To survive and reproduce, new queens must find energy-rich nectar to fuel their bodies and gather enough protein-rich pollen to feed their first broods—all within just a few weeks of emerging.
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A common eastern bumble bee worker emerges from a turtlehead in Judy Cardin and Bob Plamann’s Wisconsin yard. Native to eastern North America, turtleheads bloom from summer through fall, providing critical food for queens preparing to overwinter.
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To cater to queen bumble bees year-round, Judy Cardin and her husband, Bob Plamann, have replaced their property’s original turfgrass with mostly native plants that flower throughout the insects’ life cycles.
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In spring, the couple’s backyard includes early-blooming flowering plants such as Jacob’s ladder and bleeding heart.
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The first weekend in May, Judy Cardin hosts a “Cookies and Queens” event where she gives attendees a tour of her home garden and shares tips on ways to help queen bumble bees.
