Production in the factory managed by James Howard dropped 80 percent this year. Howard, a Garner resident, chalks up the loss to the changes along the once pastoral boulevard that has become the Hammond Road/Timber Drive connection in Garner.

"There used to be a small forest of black locust trees between the Beltline and Tryon Road, but some time last year, the black locusts were cut down," he said. The loss of those trees hit Howard's workers hard, as they depend upon the raw materials found in nature for their very survival. Howard depends upon his workers' eons of ingrained work ethic.

"They live to work," he says. "In their lifetimes, they travel an average of one hundred miles each day -- under their own power. They're the only ones on this planet that can do what they do, and they literally work themselves to death to produce nature's most perfect food."

Howard's workers are bees. And in their work, they bestow on the natural world the gift that keeps on giving -- pollination.

While his "workers" gather nectar and pollen from almost every flower they visit, in Howard's experience it's the flowering trees and shrubs that bloom between the last week of April and the first two weeks of May that honeybees most need.

"They need about 40 pounds of honey per year to see them through the winter, but with a good supply of nectar, a healthy hive can produce a hundred or more pounds," he says. "In 2005, I collected 50 pints of black locust honey from that one hive, but this spring the same colony only had about five pints to spare."

In the past decade, honeybees in North Carolina have been plagued by parasitic mites, floods (Hurricane Floyd drowned most of the honeybee colonies in the Eastern part of the state), and loss of native woodlands.

Now, Howard's workers face yet another obstacle -- more honeybees. Says Howard: "In February this year, classes held by the Wake County Beekeepers Association graduated over 50 new beekeepers. ... North Carolina now has more hobby beekeepers than any other state."

Consider this: One hive contains 30,000 to 60,000 bees. Each worker spends the entire 35 days of her life traveling from flower to flower gathering nectar. It takes a dozen workers a lifetime and a combined 42,000 flight miles to produce one teaspoonful of honey. With a quota of 100 pounds of honey a hive per year, all those new honeybees will need a lot of spring flowering trees and shrubs.

Public efforts are under way. The Department of Transportation, Howard says, has planted sourwood trees along the I-26 corridor from Asheville to the South Carolina line. But Howard pointed out that home gardeners can make a significant contribution to the growing honeybee population by merely choosing plants and trees that bloom during peak nectar-gathering season.