Our Story of Creation

Connie Mullowney, my mother, wrote the original manuscript and entitled it “Visit to a Queen.” I was a young child when she would read a bedtime chapter to my sister and me before she tucked us in at night. We were always eager to hear the next reading of her remarkable tale which, we would realize later, was a gift to us that kept
her alive in our hearts after she left us too soon. I particularly enjoyed visualizing detailed pictures of the story in my mind, but I was too young to realize how masterfully she had captured the sacred communal society of the honeybee as both a teaching tool and a great children’s story.
The images her story aroused in my imagination fueled my passion to be an artist and illustrator. I knew some day I would put those images on paper. My mother died soon after completing the manuscript, which sat in a drawer throughout the rest of my childhood and my fledgling years as an adult. It was only several years after receiving a degree in Fine Arts that I dusted it off and decided to illustrate Mother’s book. There have been fits and starts to editing and illustrating the book over the intervening decades, but the project has finally been realized.
I credit this story and the wondrous images it evoked in me as a child as the reason I was never afraid of bees. Instead it taught me to respect these amazing insects and the lessons of their brief, hard-working lives. With this in mind, I have attempted to render those vivid mental pictures that delighted me so long ago. I hope to pass on that delight to all who read it.

—Betty Poe Krauss