Those slopes of fresh turf, embroidered with every minute blossom of the moor — thyme, birdsfoot, eyebright, and dwarf purple thistle, buzzed and hummed over by busy, black-tailed, yellow-banded dumbledores.
1899 Thomas Hardy, An August Midnight:
A shaded lamp and a waving blind, / And the beat of a clock from a distant floor: / On this scene enter – winged, horned, and spined – / A longlegs, a moth, and a dumbledore —
1970 May 21, Evening Telegram, page 3:
Now and then a dumbledore or ‘busy bee’ as they are called by some, propelled itself across our path, they being extremely large and heavy this year.
1964Transactions of the American Philological Association, American Philological Association, Ginn & Co., page 267:
Others may need to be informed that a blastnashun straddlebob is a dumbledore, that is to say, a polyonymous lamellicorn coleopter, cald also a dorbeetle, a dorbug, a maybeetle, a maybug or a cockchafer, a Mflolontha rulgaris.