A Queen & Her HoneyLillian-Grace Misko is the 2011 Missouri State Honey Queen and in this role she’s traveled all over the state of Missouri on behalf of bees, beekeepers, and honey educating and enriching people’s lives.
But she’s also a college student, a devout Christian, a dancer, a daughter, and a sister to half a dozen siblings.
And she never seems to stop smiling.
Although keeping bees, studying the bible, and teaching an exercise/dance class seem distant and disconnected, the more time one spends with Lillian the more these distinct parts of her life seem to bleed into one another.
|  Lillian-Grace Misko, the 2011 Missouri State Honey Queen, carries an observation hive into the Powell Gardens’ visitor center on November 19 to share with the Kansas City Garden Club as part of a presentation on bees, honey, and beekeeping. Just as a bee colony can only have one queen, Missouri has only one Honey Queen, and over the course of her reign Lillian has logged over 4,000 miles traveling throughout the state to attend events and give presentations on behalf of Missouri’s bees and beekeepers.
“Originally I was scheduled to do a lot of children presentations in schools, some of them were 20 kids in a school room and some of them were 150 kids in a school room, and so with that in mind when I put the presentation together my audience was children. This was the first time I got to present it to adults. So I was really excited. A couple days before I went through it and I added extra details and numbers and medical things that adults would better comprehend and want to know more than kids, cause there’s going to be other things that fascinate kids more than adults. And it worked out great because the things I added in there I noticed were the things that they were excited about.” |  Following Lillian’s presentation, Judith Rogers of Clinton, Mo. is mesmerized by the observation hive while enjoying a snack made with nuts, honey, and marshmallows. “She was just amazed, she was just stunned with amazement when she saw those bees inside the observation hive.”
The presentation was Lillian’s last as Missouri’s Honey Queen. “It was also my last event as Honey Queen. So it was exciting, and it was a good one too. The ladies were so eager, they really were. Afterwards they had questions, they wanted to know more.” |  Cathy Misko, Lillian’s mother, displays a photo presentation made by her son Jachin, Lillian’s oldest brother, chronicling the capture of her very first swarm in 1990. Honeybees naturally swarm, usually in the springtime, in order to form new colonies. Although Lillian’s mom was first introduced to beekeeping in high school when she enrolled in a beekeeping class on a whim, this swarm was the first she captured on her own, eventually becoming her first hive. |  Lillian helps her mother secure a bee veil before they tend to her hives. Beekeepers sometimes use veils, gloves, and even full suits to protect against being stung, however, oftentimes these precautions are unnecessary and skipped by beekeepers as they can get in the way.
While still in high school Lillian would often help her mother with beekeeping activities, but it wasn’t until her mother encouraged her to explore the Honey Queen program that she really began to take an interest in learning about bees and how to keep them.
“She was like, ‘you should do this scholarship program, the Honey Queen program.’ That’s when I really got into it and kinda assisted her, going out to the hives with whatever she needed, whenever she needed it. It was just kinda our thing, you know, more of just helping Mom out, spending time with her.”
|  Lillian looks for the queen bee on a frame she’s removed from a hive. Each hive box holds ten frames on which bees will build honeycomb that will be used by the queen to lay eggs or by the worker bees to store honey. Once she finds the queen she will mark her with a small dot of paint so that she can be more easily located in the future.
“They really are fascinating. They’re so intricately designed and their byproduct is just so beautiful and used for so many different things. That’s what’s cool. Each time you look at it it’s a reminder that they’re so tiny but they can do so much. It reminds me of people, like when you’re flying in an airplane you know, and you look down at people and we look like little bugs, but really, here we are, we do all this stuff. It’s the same with them.”
“I look at them and am like, ‘this isn’t an accident, something had to have created these, these are so awesome, they have a purpose.’ It just reminds me about life in general; I think that’s how we are, everything around us, everything is designed for a purpose. It’s beautiful.”
|  A nurse bee pulls a young larva from its cell in order to feed it, something that neither Cathy nor Lillian has ever seen before.
“That hive particularly, when we looked at it, was not as healthy. There was just something wrong with it, you could tell. They had mites, and their wings were distorted, so these nurse bees were just acting in a different way I think.”
The average lifespan of a worker bee is four to six weeks during a busy summer. As they age they progress from cell cleaning, to nursing, to wax production, and finally foraging. There are over a dozen distinct tasks worker bees carry out through the course of their lives.
|  Lillian leads a table discussion of The Parable of the Tenants from the book of Matthew during a weekly bible study offered by the Baptist Student Union. While studying public relations at the University of Central Missouri, Lillian has been deeply involved with the Baptist Student Union and is currently the student president of the organization.
“Hear another parable. There was a master of a house who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower and leased it to his servants, and went into another country. When the season for fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the tenants to get his fruit. And the tenants took his servants and beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again he sent other servants, more than the first. And they did the same to them. Finally he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him and have his inheritance.’ And they took him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” They said to him, “He will put these wretches to a miserable death and let the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the fruits in their seasons.”
Jesus said to them, “have you never read in the Sciptures:
“ ‘The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’?
Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits. And the one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and when it falls on anyone, it will crush him.”
Matthew 21:33-44
|  Lillian and Deborah Hughes share a moment of laughter while Lillian holds Deborah’s three-week-old son Josiah. Deborah and her husband Michael met while doing missionary work in South East Asia for the International Missionary Board. They recently returned to Missouri, where Deborah grew up, and are currently living in the basement apartment of the Baptist Student Union while they work as youth leaders for the organization.
“She’s just like a step in life ahead of me, so she can relate. If I have questions she’s there to ask. I admire her joy and love, she really goes to God to please him and it’s blessed her, you see it in so many areas of her life.”
|  Lillian leads a Doxa exercise class at the University of Central Missouri. Doxa blends pilates, yoga, dance, stretching, and aerobics into a continuous, hour long workout set to music. Lillian developed the program while trying to stay in shape after a ballet injury sidelined her dancing, forcing her to undergo a series of knee surgeries that eventually forced her to give up ballet.
“I did it on my own, as my own workout, and then I had the idea of sharing it with other ladies.”
Lillian began dancing at age two and decided to focus on ballet ten years later when, along with two of her older brothers who are now both professional dancers in New York, she began taking classes at the Kansas City Ballet. Summers pulled her across the country to different ballet programs including programs at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, the Orlando Ballet, and the Julliard School. Her senior year of high school she received a student apprenticeship and trained with the Kansas City Ballet Dance Company.
|  Lillian asks her mom to double-check her final application to compete for the national Honey Queen title– the American Honey Queen–at the upcoming American Beekeeping Federation conference in Las Vegas.
Behind Lillian, a family portrait, photographed at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Mo., hangs on the dining room wall featuring Lillian’s parents, Cathy and Michael, her four older brothers, Jachin, Mnason, Milan, and Hanan, wielding rifles and sporting coon skin caps, and her younger brother Leal who tragically died before the age of one in a crib related accident. Her youngest brother, and final sibling, Jesiah, was yet to be born.
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