Dr. Betty Shabazz Health Center in East New York celebrated National Women’s Health Week with free health screenings and workshops May 11. The health fair helps to educate people in the community on how to take their medications, maintain regular doctor visits and ask the right questions when meeting with healthcare professionals, according to the Center’s Office Manager Maria Huertas.

“They’re not alone, we are here to service them and answer any questions,” she said of the community.

We talked with patients and staff at the Center and asked them about their biggest health concern.

Felicia Crespo, Patient

Robert Wheeler, Patient

Hafiz Maje, Doctor

Maria Huertas, Office Manager

Olivia Dordan, Outreach Consultant

Tamara Kee, Nurse Supervisor

Performance artist Nate Hill has been visiting homes in Brooklyn dressed as Death Bear, a character he created to help rid people of their heart aches. Since he started in November, Hill has collected items that remind people of their lost loves at more than 60 homes. He shows up at your door, listens to your final words, and then stuffs whatever you give him in a duffle bag and disappears.

On April 18, New Yorkers gathered at The Bell House in Brooklyn to sample 20 competing lamb recipes. Local chefs spared off with dishes ranging from lamb cupcakes to lamb tacos. We sent our favorite meat lover Bradley Gallo to investigate and pick a winner.

Every day people wake up and decide to get married. For some, that means a trip to Brooklyn’s City Clerk at Borough Hall.

Most cab riders don’t know it, but everywhere they go is being tracked. The city’s been collecting GPS data from cabs, and recently a group at Sense Networks, Inc. put the data to use. Their creation: CabSense, an iPhone application that helps people locate the best corners to hail a cab. Sense Networks crunched the data from 90 million cab rides and came up with a map that plots the most popular historical pickup and drop-off points. The free application also features phone numbers for car services if you’re in an area like Brooklyn, where a yellow cab can be hard to find.

Born in Alabama, Mallory Hagan began competing in pageants at the age of 13. After moving to Brooklyn a year and half ago she decided it was time to go after another crown. Brooklyn College hosted the third annual Miss Brooklyn Scholarship Pageant March 28, and Hagan was one of nine women vying for the title.

The Ink's Mary Plummer, all over the story. (Screengrab of a NYT photo by Yana Paskova)

But wait. There’s more! Upon looking over the Times story again, we found that among the pictures included in a slideshow accompanying the piece was one that featured our very own Mary Plummer who reported and wrote the story for us. It’s not every day that a news outlet takes a picture of another news outlet in the process of scooping it on a story, but sometimes, these things happen. We would note that we still adore the Times, love the City Room blog, and we would ask them to please not come after us.

Dreams of turning pro brought wrestler Patrick Ellrich, aka “The Attraction, Hayden Young,” from Atlanta, Georgia to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  Though he’s busy preparing for a WWE tryout camp next week, Ellrich has bigger things on his mind.

Megan Paska reveals a beehive's hidden inner life. Photo: Halston Bruce.

Megan Paska so missed the outdoors when she moved to Greenpoint that she turned to a life of crime: beekeeping.

Paska is one of hundreds of beekeepers around the city who’ve been keeping bees illegally. Wednesday about a dozen beekeepers came before a Department of Health panel to try to change that. They spoke in support of a proposed change in the city’s health code that would remove bees from a list of prohibited animals, like lions and crocodiles.

“I think it’s about time the law changes,” Paska said. “People need to have access to things like this.”

No one opposed the change, and beekeepers are hopeful that bees will be legalized when the Board of Health meets in March. Just about the time when bees will begin venturing out of their now dormant hives to greet spring.

Beekeepers have been building support to legalize beekeeping for the past few years, hoping that New York City will join other bee-friendly cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle.

At the hearing, beekeepers all spoke with passionate devotion to the hobby – one man received thunderous applause when he described beekeeping as a “spiritual quest,” a “Zen experience,” a “catalyst for community building.”

Brooklyn resident Gerry Gomez Pearlberg, who keeps her bees in the Catskills, says she’s fascinated by studying bees and watching how they help one another.

“I don’t keep bees to provide honey,” she said. In fact she has about 700 jars of honey in her home – she says when you start keeping bees people start giving you honey.

“I always delight in watching them work,” she said. “They’re these tiny little bugs and in the other hand they’re living in this hierarchical structure.”

Beekeepers seem to agree that there’s a larger lesson to be learned from the bees.

“You take one bee and you look at it and it’s just this tiny, simple thing,” Paska explained. “From the moment it hatches out of its shell it knows what to do.”

Paska says that the best summer nights are when she climbs the ladder to her roof after work, sits down with a beer and watches the sunset as her bees return to the hive.

“You can’t be a beekeeper and be in a rush,” she said. “You just to take your time and focus. You really just have to look and observe.”