diff --git a/changelog/4980.feature.rst b/changelog/4980.feature.rst
index 1c42547c1..40f1de9c1 100644
--- a/changelog/4980.feature.rst
+++ b/changelog/4980.feature.rst
@@ -1 +1 @@
-``monkeypatch.syspath_prepend`` calls ``pkg_resources.fixup_namespace_packages`` to handle namespace packages better.
+Namespace packages are handled better with ``monkeypatch.syspath_prepend`` and ``testdir.syspathinsert`` (via ``pkg_resources.fixup_namespace_packages``).
diff --git a/src/_pytest/pytester.py b/src/_pytest/pytester.py
index ffcd2982a..bc1405176 100644
--- a/src/_pytest/pytester.py
+++ b/src/_pytest/pytester.py
@@ -593,11 +593,16 @@ class Testdir(object):
 
         This is undone automatically when this object dies at the end of each
         test.
-
         """
+        from pkg_resources import fixup_namespace_packages
+
         if path is None:
             path = self.tmpdir
-        sys.path.insert(0, str(path))
+
+        dirname = str(path)
+        sys.path.insert(0, dirname)
+        fixup_namespace_packages(dirname)
+
         # a call to syspathinsert() usually means that the caller wants to
         # import some dynamically created files, thus with python3 we
         # invalidate its import caches