In a good year, 40 million of the 300 million pounds of honey that America bakes into its cereals, blends in its mustards, smokes with its bacon, and spoons in its tea flow through this plant - and the minivan-sized ovens, bins and mesh-filters that nowadays do the work of Luella's kettle and cheesecloth-topped straining pitcher.
But even here, where the sweet smell of success is literally in the air, it has been hard to avoid the sticky patch that the honey trade is going through, clobbered by two brands of murderous bee mites, a killing winter and lousy (in the Northeast) spring, and the bittersweet consequences of U.S. honey prices that, in a matter of months, have doubled.
It has not been a good year.
Any one of those factors would be enough to throw the honey market into a tizzy. Coming together, they've touched off unprecedented soul-searching in the honey world. And cracked open a window on an old bee network where questions of purity and price are intensely, but seldom publicly, debated.
In one fell swoop, the lack of bees and the jump in prices have altered the dynamics of pollination and marketing. Honey-packers are watching their back. ``Have you seen all the TV ads for [sugar-]frosted Cheerios?'' said Doug McGinnis of Tropical Blossom, the big Florida packer.
It was supposed to be the year everything fell into place: Beekeepers - against the pleas of packers and importers - had successfully limited cheap Chinese imports. With natural foods ascendant, honey's image was all but swaggering. New uses were popping up in the test kitchen - as a sweetening agent, for instance, that might be able to mask metallic-tasting salt substitutes in low-salt baked goods.
Grocery sales had been marching along smartly, growing at a 5 percent annual clip.
