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"They must be an odd lot," Mrs. Field Mouse remarked to her husband. "Farmer Green's meadow is becoming more unfashionable than ever. And I shall never regret having moved away from there." So that was Buster Bumblebee's first home the old house in the meadow. It was true that the Bumblebee family numbered at least two hundred souls.
As he bent once more to his work a bumblebee approached on its glad, piratical errand from flower to flower in the rapt stillness, and Feller looked around with a slight courtesy of his hat brim. "You and your fussily thunderous wings!" he said, half aloud. "I wonder if you think you're an aeroplane. Surely, they'd never train you to evolute in squadrons.
Will you?" cried Buster Bumblebee hopefully. And in his eagerness he drew even nearer to the trumpeter, who actually smiled at him. But there was something in her smile that sent a shiver up and down Buster's back. It was not at all a pleasant smile. "If you want to make me happy all you need do is to keep out of my sight," said the trumpeter rudely. "You're just a lazy, good-for-nothing drone.
Taken all round, the grub is a pretty little thing, with its bristling whiteness, which gives it the appearance of a tiny snowflake. But this elegance does not last long: grown big and strong, the bumblebee fly's grub becomes soiled with sanies, turns a russety brown and crawls about in the guise of a hulking porcupine. What becomes of it when it leaves the egg?
"And who is he, I should like to know? Point him out to me, please! For I didn't know I had a cousin at this party." "There he is!" said Betsy Butterfly, nodding her head towards the glowering Joseph. "What! That unshaven stranger in the yellowish-brown suit?" cried Buster Bumblebee. "I assure you he's no relation of mine." "You must be mistaken," Betsy persisted.
"But he promised to build a house for me as soon as he had finished working on his own. So his being a prisoner is pretty hard on me. For I've invited all my friends to a house-warming and I don't know what to do." Buster Bumblebee did not stay long in the dooryard of the missing Carpenter. Saying a mournful good-by to the sad company, he flew away toward Farmer Green's house.
But even then Buster Bumblebee was in no hurry to leave his shelter. When he did at last reach home he found the whole family much upset. Everybody was talking at once. And in a household of more than two hundred that meant that the noise was almost deafening. Naturally, Buster Bumblebee wanted to know what was the matter. It was a long time, however, before anyone would or could listen to him.
The bumblebee takes his toll in honey, but when he comes to back out he has trouble. If you will listen close by you will hear him buzzing and burbling like an overheated teakettle as he struggles. The arching filaments of those fuzzy stamens have tangled his short legs and he is shaking the pollen out of the antlers all into the fur of his yellow overcoat.
Nevertheless, you penetrate into the terrible cavern; you are able to stay there for a long time, without danger, as the eggs profusely strewn on the wrapper of the wasps' nest show. How do you set about it? Let us, first of all, remember that the bumblebee fly does not enter the enclosure in which the combs are heaped: she keeps to the outer surface of the paper rampart and there lays her eggs.
On the contrary, she seemed to avoid them. But Peppery Polly Bumblebee called on her and asked her if she had seen the handsome stranger, Mr. P. Bug. "Yes!" said Mrs. Ladybug. "I've talked with him. And it's true that he has always lived here. There was a slight mistake about his carpetbag. It belonged to one of his ancestors.
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