Do Hummingbirds Eat Bugs? Yes, Far More Than Most People Think

A hummingbird hovering at a feeder looks like the purest nectar-drinker in the yard, built for nectar and flower syrup and not much else. Watch the same bird for a full day, though, and a different picture shows up: quick detours into spiderwebs, sudden mid-air snaps at something too small to see, moments spent picking at the underside of a leaf. None of that is incidental. Insects and spiders are a real, substantial part of what a hummingbird eats, not a rare supplement to a nectar-based diet.

Hummingbirds Are Not Pure Nectar Feeders

Two real numbers get repeated for this topic, and they are not the same measurement, even though they land close enough to get confused constantly. Reviewed in Cornell Lab's All About Birds feature on hummingbird diet, a 1986 study by ornithologists J. V. Remsen, F. G. Stiles, and P. E. Scott examined the stomach contents of more than 1,600 tropical hummingbirds across 140 species and found arthropod remains in 79 percent of them, a measure of how many birds had recently eaten insects or spiders, not how much of their total calories or body mass those insects account for. Separately, University of Delaware entomologist Dr. Doug Tallamy, quoted by Choose Natives' guide to feeding hummingbirds insects and protein, has put insects and spiders at roughly 80 percent of a hummingbird's diet, a different kind of estimate, and its exact methodology, by mass, by calorie count, or by some other measure, is not published in the source available. That these two numbers land close together is a coincidence of rounding, not agreement between two studies measuring the same thing. What both agree on, regardless of methodology, is the basic conclusion: a hummingbird that ate only nectar and never touched an insect would be the unusual bird, not the typical one.

The uncited "60 to 80 percent of a hummingbird's diet is insects" version that circulates constantly on social media appears to be a garbled, unsourced echo of Tallamy's estimate, stripped of the name and the caveat that comes with it. It happens to be roughly right, but repeating it without a source is exactly the kind of unattributed claim this piece is trying to avoid adding to. The Cornell feature also traces this line of research back further than 1986: it credits early hummingbird-insect observations to Helmuth O. Wagner's 1940s fieldwork in Mexico, a 1980 Arizona study by Robert Montgomerie and Catherine Redsell documenting specific foraging events, and F. G. Stiles' own 18 years of direct observation at a single Costa Rican field station, La Selva, a research thread that runs across five decades rather than a single isolated finding.

What Bugs Are on the Menu

Kansas State University's Extension entomology blog lists ants, aphids, beetles, gnats, mosquitoes, and certain wasps among documented prey, along with insect larvae and eggs, and notes that a hummingbird can eat "between several hundred to a thousand insects in one day," depending on availability. Tallamy's list, via Choose Natives, includes spiders, flies, mosquitoes, aphids, bees, beetles, caterpillars, and gnats, with one specific update worth flagging: ants were dropped from an earlier version of that list "due to lack of supporting studies," a reminder that even a credentialed source revises its own claims when the evidence doesn't hold up.

Worth separating clearly: this is about ants as occasional prey, a minor and disputed part of the picture at best. It has nothing to do with ants as feeder pests, which is a completely different problem covered in our guide to keeping ants out of a hummingbird feeder. A hummingbird eating an ant off a leaf and a trail of ants invading a feeder's nectar reservoir are unrelated situations that happen to involve the same insect.

How a Hummingbird Actually Catches an Insect

The Cornell Lab feature describes four distinct foraging techniques documented by researchers, and a single bird uses more than one depending on what's available. Hover-gleaning is plucking prey directly from a spiderweb or the surface of a leaf while hovering in place. Sally-hawking is flying up from a perch to snatch a single insect in mid-air, then returning to the same perch, the same basic pattern used by many flycatchers. Hover-hawking is more active still, zigzagging directly through a swarm of small insects rather than targeting one at a time. Sally-gleaning is picking an insect off a leaf or flower from a perch, without the hovering step. None of these require abandoning flower-feeding; a hummingbird moves between nectar and insect foraging constantly, often within the same few minutes.

Why Females Hunt Insects Far More Than Males

Ornithologist F. G. Stiles, summarizing 18 years of observation at La Selva, Costa Rica, in a 1995 report in The Condor, found that during nesting season, females "spend three to four times more time searching for arthropods than males do," per the Cornell Lab's synthesis of that research. The reason is straightforward: males contribute nothing to raising young, so a nesting female is the sole provider for herself and her brood, and insects become an increasingly significant share of what she delivers to the nest as her chicks grow and their protein needs increase. Our guide to baby hummingbirds covers the specific feeding timeline in detail, including when insects are first added to what a chick is fed; this post is about the adult foraging behavior behind that timeline, not a restatement of it.

Why This Matters for Anyone Feeding Hummingbirds

A feeder full of fresh nectar is genuinely important, but it was never meant to be the whole diet, and it isn't one. Nectar and nectar substitutes supply fast-burning energy for a bird with an extraordinarily high metabolism, while insects and spiders supply the protein, fat, and other nutrients nectar simply doesn't contain, nutrients a hummingbird needs year-round and especially during nesting. The practical takeaway for a backyard is less about the feeder and more about everything else in the yard: a garden that's routinely sprayed for insects removes a food source hummingbirds depend on directly, not just tolerate. Our guide to attracting hummingbirds covers the pesticide-avoidance case in full detail; the short version here is that a hummingbird-friendly yard treats insects as part of the food supply, not as a problem to eliminate.

It also reframes a common backyard assumption. Someone who keeps a spotless, insect-free garden and wonders why hummingbirds seem to visit only briefly before moving on may be unintentionally removing half of what they came for. A yard with a reliable nectar source and a healthy, unsprayed population of small insects and spiders offers something closer to a complete hummingbird diet than either one alone, which is a more useful frame than treating bugs as an unrelated nuisance to be managed separately from the birds a person is actually trying to support.

Image credits: Header, Broad-tailed Hummingbird in flight, by Kati Fleming (CC BY-SA 3.0). Anna's Hummingbird at a feeder by Frank Schulenburg (CC BY-SA 4.0). Cross orb-weaver spider by James Johnstone (CC BY 2.0). Hummingbird nest feeding by Mike's Birds (CC BY-SA 2.0). All via Wikimedia Commons.