On the issue of nest-searching Bombus queens bumbling into a pollination box colony, a few practical notes.
First and foremost, when many rental colonies of bumblebees for pollination have no queen.
You have "rented" a doomed colony, and while you may return the box, the colony is not self-sustaining. This is to protect the profits of the bee merchant, and is often touted as a way to "protect native species". So, a wild queen wandering in is likely welcomed in that scenario.
Second, bumbles are perhaps the worst judges of quality real estate ever. There are several "waves" of queen exploration, one in early spring and several more following each major rain storm, as nests are flooded, and the queen abandons the nest and seeks a new, drier site. My handcrafted boxes have a roomy front parlor and a sung nest area, are well-vented, and have actual Kevlar entrance tubes that run up to the surface, as other types of hose deteriorated.
I have little sensors in the entrance tubes of my bumblebee nestboxes, they are a broomstraw glued to a microswitch that the bumbles brush aside, so they count both entrances and exits, and wait for a Bluetooth connection from my phone to report their counts. Of my dozen boxes, some will remain unoccupied until after the 3rd or 4th spring rain, proving that bumbles have very little sense of "drainage". The boxes are under massive flagstones that require a small crane to move, so while the nests are very safe from meddling, they only get cleaned out and refurbed for new tenants once a year, in winter.
There are all sorts of superstitions surrounding the "correct" approach to attracting a queen to one's nestboxes. I do not use rat/mouse urine to "scent" the bedding material, but I do use natural excelsior (so-called "wood wool") packing material or Spanish Moss.
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