The Birth of Mielificent

In the spring of 2012 I was sitting on the floor in a hotel hallway at a science fiction convention, working on a small challenge piece for the Surface Design Association’s biennial conference exhibit, when a costumer I admired stopped to ask if I was making something for a costume. I muttered “no,” but it was too late. The fire had been lit.

It was just an idea. I have plenty of them and couldn’t really make them all even if I was the least bit prolific. But it rattled around, and bobbed up and down. The inspirational piece was a bee hive motif. Bees. Bees. What could I do with bees? Queen bee. Of course. Queen of what? Queen of the Honey bees? Queen of the Spelling Bees? Queen of the Quilting Bees?

Queen of the Killer Bees.

Naturally.

It didn’t hurt the idea that this would be a science fiction convention competition costume, where over-the-top gets its own prize, or that three shining stars of the genre were known as the “Killer Bees” (Greg Bear, Greg Benford, and David Brin—one of them is even a friend). I began collecting possible materials: a golden ball from the Dollar Store; two strings of Mardi Gras beads with half-inch plastic pearls given to me by a friend’s friend visiting from New Orleans. A general silhouette began to take shape in my mind. But this was back burner stuff.

Years went by. My father died. Then Dublin ran unopposed for the 2019 World Science Fiction Convention. I could not pass up this excuse to go back to Europe. Suddenly I had a goal. Create the Queen of the Killer Bees and take her to Dublin to compete in the “Masquerade”. (It was originally an actual fancy dress ball, but was long ago taken over by fans who wanted to show off their creations in a more formal venue.) I had never been in a “Masquerade.” So naturally I figured I’d start pretty much at the top, with a sort of dry-run at my local convention where the idea first began.

But first, the Queen needed a name, and a theme song. The song was easy. Lorde’s “Royals” was not new, but teenagers from literally all over were posting covers of it on You Tube at the time. It was perfect. The name, I hate to admit, was really just one of those punnish flashes one gets now and then completely out of context.But I love it, and I’m very proud of it.

It was a year from the first serious sketch to getting the invitation to submit a presentation for the 2020 Design Principles and Practices Conference. I had been building for several months by then, slowly, on weekends mostly. I could not resist. It seemed like a long shot, but I was doing a lot of research on bees for this piece, and the design kept evolving, based on that research and on all the bee-related materials I kept finding.

The story of that creative evolution is the subject of my poster, but it is really told in the journal I kept from March 2019 through February 2020, which I have included as an appendix (though it is really the main course here). I invite you to sample that journal randomly (it’s 60 pages long). Much of it was written on my bus commute, half asleep, and so it tends to be pretty brutally honest sometimes. I have also included some images of the construction process and one of the piece the provided the original inspiration.