Queen Bee

Her highness doesn't know it yet, but she will be evicted soon from the Bensalem Township municipal building. A queen bee and her colony have taken up residence in a wall of a room where employees eat lunch and sip coffee. The outward sign of their existence is a squishy bulge in the wallpaper. Mayor Edward Burns says he thinks honey will be found behind that part of the wall. Evidence of a royal colony within the township building first became apparent last spring. One exterminator and a couple of beekeepers later, Burns said, he still thinks the queen bee and her subjects are inside the wall of the Hulmeville Road building.

Like many larger-than-life figures, Pauline Kael, the contentious movie essayist who died Monday at age 82, was minuscule of physical stature. But though scarcely 5 feet, she cut a giant swath through American movies and letters. As her slangy and impassioned prose influenced at least two generations of filmmakers and film lovers, so her insights sparked a conflagration that still rages. With Pauline - "as with Cher or Liza, the surname is superfluous," wrote People magazine - the gloves were off. She was a bare-knuckles fighter who defended her love of trashy movies, delivering a knockout punch to the prigs who reverentially spoke of film as art. Movies were too much fun to leave them to a film Vatican, contended the woman who was both high priestess of pop culture and chief rabbi of the cinematic temple.

Waiting for Lil' Kim is like waiting for the bus. And waiting for the bus. And waiting for the bus. And just when you're about to give up waiting for the bus, guess what? The bus doesn't come. So we wait for Lil' Kim, two hours for rap diva Lil' Kim, who, as it turns out, is coming to the Philadelphia Museum of Art's steps in her very own bus. It's flaming pink. Subtle, like Lil' Kim. Lil' Kim is so absolutely ghetto fabulous that she hasn't had a record in four years - an election cycle, another Olympics moment, a leap between leap years - and still she's dope.

QUOTE "Everyone, I suspect, knows somebody who has had bowel cancer, yet there is a real reluctance to talk about bowels and bottoms in this country. " - Britain's Prince Charles, at a London health-care event yesterday Kathie Lee Gifford made noises about leaving "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee" for years - until finally, finally jumping ship this summer. So we won't take Rosie O'Donnell too seriously now that she's started to make the same noises. The popular morning chat-show host says she wants to quit "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," when her contract expires in two years.

Here it is: the first official weekend of the summer of '94. So let's get down to some serious party business at the Shore. The really big news in Somers Point is the recent renovation of DiOrio's Circle Cafe, 10 MacArthur Blvd., 609-927-6111. This longtime favorite watering hole used to be the kind of place where your feet stuck to the floor and the barstools wobbled so badly that you got motion sickness. Not anymore, thanks to a spiffy new paint job, colorful carpeting and remodeled bar and cafe tables in soothing pastel and gray hues.

WHILE THE VOTERS (the minority who care) focus on tomorrow's primary, the Insiders, Consultants, Power Brokers and Money Changers - er, I mean Money Raisers - are contemplating two gathering storms. First, who will the worker bees select as their Queen Bee when City Council is sworn in on Jan. 2? ("Queen Bee" is a metaphor. It could be a dude.) Philadelphia politics is a snow globe where the opportunity to get elected exists mainly for the flakes (ahem) on the inside. This results from the party system, which requires potential candidates to prove their loyalty by butt-smooching and providing "voluntary" services before being allowed to run. Few candidates are outsiders without political connections.

The thousands of honeybees that survived after being bounced from a truck on the New Jersey Turnpike Saturday are now residing on the east side of Cherry Hill. They are in the backyard of Seth Belson, president of the South Jersey Beekeepers Association. While no humans who encountered the bees on the turnpike were injured, thousands of bees died after being thrown from their honeycombs onto hot asphalt in 100 degree temperatures on the turnpike near Exit 3 in Runnemede after a northbound truck lost the cargo.

Few things fly faster than rhymes from Lady Sovereign's lips - unless it's the buzz that has traveled across the pond in advance of the queen bee of the British grime scene's Philadelphia debut at the Silk City Lounge. Her EP, Vertically Challenged, the first U.S. release by the 5-foot-1 Sovereign - born Louise Berman ("call me Sov," she says over the phone from London) - came out just this month. But, beginning with "Cha Ching," the frenetic, angular, Eminem-ish single that appeared on the compilation album Run the Road earlier this year, word has spread rapidly about Sovereign's gift of gab. So rapidly, in fact, that rapper-turned-Island/Def Jam mahoff Jay-Z flew her to New York and signed her a few months back.

Each spring, as the sap runs and the nectar flows, beekeepers across the county have their eyes on what for them is one of life's ultimate freebies: free bees. Awakened after a winter of dormancy, bees erupt with a flurry when warmer weather comes. Those workers that survived the winter begin to gather honeydew, which precedes nectar, from flowers, and the queen bee begins her annual egg-laying spree of up to a half-million eggs. But each year, the worker bees take one or more of the queen's eggs, put it in a special elongated cell and feed it something known as "royal jelly," similar to honey but higher in protein.

It was the kind of late-inning buzz that none of the players had experienced before. The Houston Astros beat the San Diego Padres, 7-2, yesterday, but only after waiting out a 52-minute delay in the top of the ninth inning caused when a swarm of bees took over leftfield at Petco Park. "It's how this year's going - bizarre things," said Houston's Geoff Blum, who hit a three-run homer and finished with four RBI. "You think you've seen it all in baseball and you're going to see something new. " The drama began with Houston leading, 6-1, with two outs in the top of the ninth.

WHILE THE VOTERS (the minority who care) focus on tomorrow's primary, the Insiders, Consultants, Power Brokers and Money Changers - er, I mean Money Raisers - are contemplating two gathering storms. First, who will the worker bees select as their Queen Bee when City Council is sworn in on Jan. 2? ("Queen Bee" is a metaphor. It could be a dude.) Philadelphia politics is a snow globe where the opportunity to get elected exists mainly for the flakes (ahem) on the inside. This results from the party system, which requires potential candidates to prove their loyalty by butt-smooching and providing "voluntary" services before being allowed to run. Few candidates are outsiders without political connections.

It was the kind of late-inning buzz that none of the players had experienced before. The Houston Astros beat the San Diego Padres, 7-2, yesterday, but only after waiting out a 52-minute delay in the top of the ninth inning caused when a swarm of bees took over leftfield at Petco Park. "It's how this year's going - bizarre things," said Houston's Geoff Blum, who hit a three-run homer and finished with four RBI. "You think you've seen it all in baseball and you're going to see something new. " The drama began with Houston leading, 6-1, with two outs in the top of the ninth.

Oh, the possibilities! The National League boasted three 1-0 games Wednesday night, and it led to some interesting information on David Pinto's thought-provoking blog, "Baseball Musings. " Since 1957, of the 104,429 games played in the major leagues, 2,225 resulted in a 1-0 score, meaning there's about a 2 percent chance of a 1-0 duel breaking out any time you watch a game. The posting went on to talk about the relationship between scoring and a 1-0 game. A 1-0 game was most likely in 1968 (when pitching dominated)

"The Secret Life of Bees" is like something Mark Twain might have come up with if he wanted to get on Oprah. It's Huck Finn with a book-group makeover, so your abused child runaway becomes a girl (Dakota Fanning, naturally), and the on-the-road African-American companion becomes one of the Dreamgirls (Jennifer Hudson). Instead of an amusing odyssey of hucksters and swindlers, we get an earnest, thorough dunking in loving matriarchal society - one, incidentally, that derives its living and its philosophy from another matriarchal society, bees.

The thousands of honeybees that survived after being bounced from a truck on the New Jersey Turnpike Saturday are now residing on the east side of Cherry Hill. They are in the backyard of Seth Belson, president of the South Jersey Beekeepers Association. While no humans who encountered the bees on the turnpike were injured, thousands of bees died after being thrown from their honeycombs onto hot asphalt in 100 degree temperatures on the turnpike near Exit 3 in Runnemede after a northbound truck lost the cargo.

The third graders swarmed into the Radnor Elementary School auditorium, transforming it into a thrumming, oversized beehive. The queen bee squatted in the rear, laying make-believe eggs. Guard bees stood at the ready as funeral bees, their pipe-cleaner antennae bobbing, carried out the dead. Beekeeper Clifford Wright-Sunflower pushed his straw hat back on his head and smiled at the organized chaos he had created. His traveling program, Dancin' With the Honeybees, is a kind of in-class field trip that gives children throughout the Philadelphia region a chance to become big, imaginary bees and get close to small, real ones.

Few things fly faster than rhymes from Lady Sovereign's lips - unless it's the buzz that has traveled across the pond in advance of the queen bee of the British grime scene's Philadelphia debut at the Silk City Lounge. Her EP, Vertically Challenged, the first U.S. release by the 5-foot-1 Sovereign - born Louise Berman ("call me Sov," she says over the phone from London) - came out just this month. But, beginning with "Cha Ching," the frenetic, angular, Eminem-ish single that appeared on the compilation album Run the Road earlier this year, word has spread rapidly about Sovereign's gift of gab. So rapidly, in fact, that rapper-turned-Island/Def Jam mahoff Jay-Z flew her to New York and signed her a few months back.

Like many larger-than-life figures, Pauline Kael, the contentious movie essayist who died Monday at age 82, was minuscule of physical stature. But though scarcely 5 feet, she cut a giant swath through American movies and letters. As her slangy and impassioned prose influenced at least two generations of filmmakers and film lovers, so her insights sparked a conflagration that still rages. With Pauline - "as with Cher or Liza, the surname is superfluous," wrote People magazine - the gloves were off. She was a bare-knuckles fighter who defended her love of trashy movies, delivering a knockout punch to the prigs who reverentially spoke of film as art. Movies were too much fun to leave them to a film Vatican, contended the woman who was both high priestess of pop culture and chief rabbi of the cinematic temple.

QUOTE "Everyone, I suspect, knows somebody who has had bowel cancer, yet there is a real reluctance to talk about bowels and bottoms in this country. " - Britain's Prince Charles, at a London health-care event yesterday Kathie Lee Gifford made noises about leaving "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee" for years - until finally, finally jumping ship this summer. So we won't take Rosie O'Donnell too seriously now that she's started to make the same noises. The popular morning chat-show host says she wants to quit "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," when her contract expires in two years.

If you happen to see a mysterious stranger with thinning dark hair and a lean and hungry look lurking around the tent in front of the Horticulture Center around 2:30 in the afternoon Saturday, do not be alarmed. He is a harmless pumpkin pie addict. "Pieface," as his Uncle Julius called him some (don't ask how many) years ago, is simply in quest of a pumpkin pie. A whole one, preferably. A big slice? OK, a sample? The tent is the locale of the third annual Great Pumpkin Pie Contest, one of the features of this year's annual Philadelphia Harvest Show.