Ben Crawley makes local honey. And he does it in other people's back yards, under the guise of "Mr. Buzz."

Crawley, 31, does business by setting up colonies in people's gardens and maintaining the hives for them. The clients don't have to do any work, except make sure there's a water supply nearby for the thirsty bees.

Customers can get beehives, monthly maintenance and lessons, at prices ranging from $65 to $125 a month.

The clients get a garden full of blooming flowers and larger yields of fresh fruits and vegetables. Crawley gets honey to sell to individual customers and to restaurants such as Jujube and Bin 54 in Chapel Hill. He'll then give the individual clients a case or two of honey.

"A lot of times, people just want to give something back. They're environmentally conscious, and they're doing whatever they can to keep the bee population up," Crawley said. "I'll come out once a week or once every other week. I'm making sure the colony is productive, is alive and doing well and is pest-free."

Crawley has wanted to be a beekeeper since he was a child. Instead, he took a detour and studied to become a welder. He got a job as a welder in 2002 for a door manufacturing company in Wilmington for a year.

One day a co-worker asked him what he wanted to be growing up.

A beekeeper, he replied.

That was it.

He signed up for a semester-long, beginners beekeeping course at N.C. State University in the spring of 2003. He worked in the bee lab on campus for a bit. Then, he was offered a job at a beekeeping company in Hawaii, where he helped manage about 25,000 colonies of bees during the spring of 2005.

He returned to the mainland that fall and worked for a local beekeeper until the spring of 2006.

Soon, a friend mentioned that he wanted to keep bees in his back yard but didn't know how. Crawley helped him and realized he should start charging people for his expertise.

The Mr. Buzz business was born.

Harnessing nature

"I always thought it was the coolest thing in the world -- to see that many bees," Crawley said. "It's kind of like surfing. You're just taking a part of nature and harnessing it."

Beekeepers help preserve a buzzing species of honey-makers and pollinators, Crawley said.

"There are just not bees in the wild anymore," he said. "So anytime you see a bee in your back yard, you need to thank your local beekeeper."

But he also has thoughts about the cause of a mysterious major die-off of bee colonies. Crawley thinks one factor in the die-off has been beekeepers experimenting with putting "unapproved chemicals" into the hives, which would then affect bees in other colonies through cross-pollination.

Jim Ward, a part-time psychologist in Raleigh who lives near Fletcher Park, hired Crawley this past spring. He walks through the park several times a day to go to work, and he wanted the bees to help pollinate the flowers at the park and in his own garden.

"I just think it's neat to have bees," Ward said. "It's older than the Bible, you know. Bees have been around for a zillion years."

Bees have even helped Ward's garden flourish in the middle of the drought that's affecting North Carolina and the rest of the South.

"We've had the best tomato season this year, ever -- even with the drought," he said. "We are eating tomatoes today that are from my garden."

Josh Decarolis, a chef de cuisine at Jujube, tried the Mr. Buzz honey and won't try others.

"I've used my fair share of honey ... I use a lot of expensive ingredients," he said. "That's by far the best honey I've ever tasted. I don't know what he does. I don't know how it works. But it's pretty serious stuff."

It has more flavor, he said, with a fruity quality. It reminds him of when he used to pick apples at the local apple farm and enjoy fresh, local honey. He uses honey as a natural sweetener in his food. He likes the more-natural flavors of the dishes to come out.

"It has this fresh, rustic quality to it. It's not as refined," Decarolis said. "It has more of the actual taste of the bees."

Because Crawley takes pride in using only the honey that comes straight from his own colonies, he doesn't produce large quantities consistently. So, his brand can't be found on your grocer's shelves. He has already sold out for the year. The next crop of honey won't be until mid-April.

People can order individual jars or order by cases. Jujube already has two colonies set aside to meet its demand.

Although Crawley is a full-time beekeeper, he has to work a part-time job as a server at a Raleigh restaurant to help pay the bills.

But "I like the farm being my office," he said.