A South Philly Beekeeper Is Coaxing 10,000 Bees Out of a Lambert Street Sewer With a Funnel and the Neighbors Get the Honey

A South Philadelphia parking spot on Lambert Street has been quietly hosting 10,000 squatters for the past three to four weeks, and none of them pay rent. They are honeybees. They picked a storm sewer as their new headquarters, and now a local beekeeper is trying to evict them with a funnel, patience, and the kind of plan you would expect from a heist movie where the loot is honey.

The story broke on May 6 when neighbors noticed something was off. Then Thom Duffy, the resident with the most cinematic instincts on the block, filmed roughly a thousand bees swirling around a parked car and posted the footage. Within hours, Lambert Street had a planter, warning signs, and a folk hero situation on its hands.

Mark Berman vs the Sewer Hive

Enter Mark Berman of Anna Bees Honey. He has been keeping bees long enough to know that lifting a sewer cover on a thriving colony of 10,000 insects is the urban planning equivalent of poking a beehive with a stick, which is exactly the metaphor we are trying to avoid. So he did not lift it. Instead he installed what beekeepers call a one-way funnel, a device that lets bees out to forage but makes reentry nearly impossible.

His reasoning is colder than you would think. “Without the food sources coming in, the queen slows down her egg laying,” Berman told 102.9 WMGK. “The bees will come out and take up residence in the trap box.” Translation: he is starving the queen into a real estate decision. It is the most polite forced relocation in apiculture.

The whole process will take weeks. Berman has been doing this long enough that he openly admits he has never seen bees pick a sewer before, which in the world of urban beekeeping is roughly equivalent to a marine biologist saying they have never seen this kind of octopus. Philly has had urban beehives since 1914 and the city now runs close to 500 active hives. A sewer is still a first.

Why a Sewer, of All Places

Wild honeybee colonies normally pick tree hollows, attic eaves, abandoned chimneys. The standard requirements are dry, dark, defensible, and about 40 liters of internal volume. A storm sewer with the right airflow technically checks every box, except the part where humans drive cars two feet above your front door. The colony presumably arrived as a swarm, a queen and her loyal entourage looking for new property after outgrowing the old hive. They scouted. They voted, because that is genuinely how swarms make decisions. They picked the sewer. Bee real estate has notes.

It is the same urban-wildlife pattern we keep seeing this year. Tokyo’s DisneySea parks just discovered crows have been dismantling a two billion dollar Rapunzel tower for nesting material. A capybara named Samba spent fifty days on the run from a UK zoo and forced a botanical forensics investigation. A guy in Yerevan painted his donkey to look like a zebra and accidentally launched a city-wide manhunt. Cities are not human cities anymore. They are co-working spaces with no NDA.

About the Honey

Neighbors have already nicknamed the eventual yield “sewer honey.” Berman, to his credit, was professional enough to clarify that this is not how honey works. The bees travel up to three miles to forage, so their flight zone is South Philly gardens and street trees, not the contents of the storm drain. Once relocated to the trap box, they will build new comb and start producing fresh honey from local flowers. Berman has already promised to bring some of that honey back to the Lambert Street residents who babysat the situation. It is a transaction. Block off your parking spot for a month, get a jar of honey. Most HOAs are less generous.

This is also a reminder that pollinators are in trouble. Wild colonies finding sewers, dumpsters, mailboxes, and HVAC vents is partly charming and partly a flag. Habitat is being eaten by development, and bees are improvising. The Philadelphia Beekeepers Guild has been quietly running classes since 2009 to teach residents how to host hives properly, on rooftops and in backyards, instead of accidentally inheriting one on a parking spot.

The Cat Perspective

If we are being honest, no cat would have signed off on this hive’s location. Cats are seasoned territorial scouts. They check airflow. They check sun exposure. They check whether a small human will eventually leave snacks. A sewer fails on every metric, especially the snack one. The bees should have hired a feline consultant.

But there is something to learn from the colony’s confidence. They picked the most unlikely address on the block, set up shop, and convinced an entire human neighborhood to defend their parking space for them. They reorganized human infrastructure around their needs. That is approximately the Pudgy Cat operating philosophy, except cats do it inside warm houses and the queen is just whoever is loudest at 6 a.m.

The Lambert Street saga is still in progress. Berman is on the funnel. The queen is presumably issuing memos. The neighbors are waiting for the honey. And if Philadelphia learns anything from this, it is that urban wildlife is going to keep picking weirder addresses, and the right move is to call a professional, not to lift the cover.