the secret life of bees; The buzz in Savannah: a beekeeper's skin care, straight from the hive.(Ted Dennard)

Byline: Ying Chu

The first time I opened up a hive, there were thousands of bees, and all I could hear was that whhhhrrrrrr . . . I was terrified," says Ted Dennard, a ruggedly handsome Savannah honey farmer with tousled blond hair and a lilting Southern accent. In his uniform of cowboy boots, jeans, button-down shirt,

and regulation screened hat, Dennard has been reaching into hives bare-handed for the past 25 years-since he was just a kid. Since then he's had thousands of bee stings, but he insists they're really not that bad. "If you accidentally squeeze a bee, that's when you get stung," he says. "But they don't want to do it. Honeybees are the friendliest kind, once you get to know them."

Dennard knows bees. Seven years ago, after a stint in the Peace Corps (beekeeping in Jamaica, no less), he set up camp-or, rather, a hive-on one of Georgia's small coastal islands and started his own business, the Savannah Bee Company. He began selling jars of his local crop, in varieties like tupelo, black sage, sourwood, and raspberry, as well as pure honeycomb cakes (which taste great on a baguette with creamy blue cheese or on a tart apple slice, he says). The first two years, he paid his rent in honey.

Dennard learned that he could cure his sore throat in 20 minutes with a single dose of propolis sap, and help to ease allergies by ingesting bee pollen. What he wasn't expecting was a beauty epiphany. But whenever he washed off his hands-covered in honey from a day with the bees-he noticed "they would come out squeaky clean and amazingly soft." It was ...