"It's no longer just the requisite bear in the cupboard," she said, referring to honey bottles in ursine shapes.
Traffic ebbed and flowed, with locals coming in for cream puffs, egg-salad sandwiches, homemade boil-in-the-bag ragout, miniature pots of honey, bottles of cane-sugar Coke, olive oil from a spigot and sausages made with rabbit, pork, figs and pistachios.
There were a glass teapot filled, the label said, with jasmine honey, four bottles of aftershave lotion, some alabaster bookends, and a dozen steak knives.
But he's more likely to pitch another recent release, Red Raspberry After Dinner (raspberry sweetened with honey; half-bottle, $12).
A day later, at the Knob Creek Guest House on the Jim Beam grounds in Clermont, Ky., Mr. Noe pulled out some Red Stag Spiced and Red Stag Honey Tea, bottled the day before and ready to be shipped in January.
Chandler's Sandhill Honey & Bottling Co. has benefited from state and federal financing over the years, most recently with a $50,000 grant from the USDA's Rural Business-Cooperative Servine in October.
Now she helps Mr. Trapani, 62, collect and bottle honey in the couple's "honey house," outfitted with a large, drumlike stainless-steel extractor and scores of five-gallon pails ready to be filled with raw honey.
Inside were all the usual things, neon signs for Budweiser and Coors, a jukebox that might once have worked, honey-colored bottles lined up behind the bar, and the head of a deer — or, no, an elk — jammed into one wall as if this were Alaska and somebody had just shot it.
The Tassots sell wildflower honey that they bottle and distribute from their 10-acre Buzzing Acres Farm here.
ROXANNE QUIMBY was just looking for a little extra income when she teamed up in 1989 with Burt Shavitz, a local beekeeper, and started a kitchen-table production line to bottle honey and make beeswax candles in rural Maine.
