Remember This?
Remember This? The Busy Bee in Roundup
Eighty years of home cooking on the way through Roundup, 56 of them under Mark and Mary Ann Petrie. The building has to come down. The horse stays.
The Busy Bee started in 1945 in an old church building brought over from Ryegate, KTVQ reported when it closed in 2025. Mark and Mary Ann Petrie bought it in 1969 and ran it for 56 years. A mural painted that year, which used to be on the outside, is still on a restroom wall.
“You’ve got to enjoy cooking,” Mark Petrie told the station. “It was all home cooking, roast beef, chicken, whatever, and that’s the type of cooks we had.” There was a bar and casino, a front desk, a main dining room, a 1950s-style diner, and memorabilia everywhere, including a photo of a Roundup resident with Wilt Chamberlain. Regulars came after church on Sunday. The Petries did balloons and roses for Valentine’s Day.
FEMA told the Petries the building has to be demolished because it sits in a floodplain. Musselshell County commissioners plan to turn the land into a park, and the horse and marquee out front will stay. That is the right call. “Little kids, they don’t remember Busy Bee,” Mark Petrie said. “They remember the horse.”
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Filed under: Places That Are Gone, Restaurants, Road Trips
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