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"Oh!" growled the young Nor'-Wester, who had been carried from the banquet hall, and now wore the sour expression that is the aftermath of banquets. "Look at that fat lump of a bumblebee distilling honey from the rose! There are others who would appreciate that sort of thing! This is the wilderness of lost opportunities!"
"Besides, I may want to catch some more like him," he explained. Looking out through the glass sides of his prison, which his captor held tightly in one hand, Buster Bumblebee saw many of his mother's workers hovering about the clover-tops, gathering nectar for the honeycomb at home. The twins saw the workers, too. They were delighted. And so was Johnnie Green.
So it happens that no bumblebee ever sees its own father, and no father bumblebee ever sees his own children. In the honey bee the male, which has been fortunate enough to fertilize the queen, pays for his honor by death within the hour. Superfluous bachelors, among the honey bees, when the bridal season has passed, are driven from the hive to die of starvation.
The hot sun beat down on the long stretch of blue-grass, and up from the creek came the warm odor of mint; a fat old bumblebee hummed close to her head, but she did not stir. She was thinking about the watermelon stockings. Presently she began to move stealthily toward the coop, watching Nell cautiously from the corner of her eyes.
In an instant a strange, belligerent little gentleman had sprung to his feet and was confronting her with features that resembled those of a magnified and outraged bumblebee. "I am so sorry!" stammered Miss Lady in laughing chagrin, "I I thought you were the Doctor!" "Even so," admitted the stranger rather firmly, standing with chin lifted and nostrils dilated, "even so.
The flies, butterflies, and ants had been attracted, as always, by its sweets; the preoccupied convivial flies, in turn, were a tempting bait for the wasps and hornets, and my dragon-fly and mock bumblebee found a similar attraction in the neighborhood.
Soon the floor was crowded with merry people who bowed and scraped to one another and danced breakdowns and cut pigeon-wings and other capers, while Buster Bumblebee flitted gaily about just above their bobbing heads, trying his best to keep time to the music and wishing that he had brought some of his friends along with him to Farmer Green's party.
In a paper of this kind it is of course possible only to hint at a few representative examples of floral mechanisms, but these would be indeed incomplete without a closing reference to that wonderful tribe of flowers with which the theory of cross-fertilization will ever be memorably associated. I have previously alluded to the absolute dependence of the red clover upon the bumblebee.
"Why don't you come out?" Buster asked. "How can I?" said the Carpenter. "Don't you see that I'm a prisoner?" "Yes! But why don't you cut your way out?" Buster Bumblebee asked him. "Well, I've tried," the Carpenter confessed. "But this glass is so hard that I can't even dent it." "But you're a woodworker not a glass-worker!" exclaimed Buster Bumblebee.
And then the men caught up their coats and strolled back to the dooryard. The small boys had all hurried ahead of them as soon as they noticed that the women and girls were already setting generous dishes of goodies upon long tables beneath the shade of the maple trees in front of the farmhouse. And when he saw what was going on Buster Bumblebee hastened to the maple grove too.
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