To hive and to hold: stung by growing pains, our Small Business of the year finds itself busy as the bees its customers keep as orders swarm in.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: FEATURE

There's not a lot of cleared land in these parts, and apple and peach orchards going bare this time of year take up most of what there is. Through gaps in the dazzling red and yellow of the forest's oaks, maples and poplars, Wilkesboro nestles in the deep valley below and, farther west, the Blue Ridge rises. "We're so far out in the sticks even the Presbyterians handle snakes," Steve Forrest says, laughing.

He laughs a lot. So does his wife, Sandy. In the '70s, when they bought this place just down the road from Bootleggers Ridge, a neighbor gave them a primer on the local economy. "He said, 'You can grow yourself a wagonload of apples, haul them down to Statesville, lay up under that wagon to sleep all week long and peddle them a peck at a time. Or you can run them through your still, and them folks will come up here and get 'em from you. Now which do you think I'm going to do?'"

Many of the Forrests' customers--70 or more on a good day--trek to the top of Brushy Mountain, though not for the moonshine Wilkes County once was famous for. Off the beaten path, Business North Carolina's Small Business of the Year employs nearly 50 people who make and sell beekeeping equipment and supplies. More than 24,000 customers have shopped there in person and by mail order and e-commerce the last two years. Sales this year are projected at about $6.7 million, up 24%--despite the recession--from last year and 81% higher than in 2007.

"Brushy Mountain Bee Farm Inc. is a most unusual company," says BNC Publisher Ben Kinney, one of the three judges of this year's competition. "But in many ways, it is the quintessential small business, despite being one of the nation's half-dozen or so largest in its niche." The other judges were Gail McDonald, N.C. Department of Commerce small-business ombudsman, and Peter Mitchell, president of Stoneville-based TigerTek Inc., which was last year's winner. Winston-Salem-based BB&T Corp. sponsored the competition, as it has since 2000.

Down Beekeeper Drive, a gravel lane in the Moravian Falls community, the company's swelling compound is barely detectable through the woods. But once there, the hum of saws, chatter of mechanized nailers and smell of fresh-cut wood permeate the air. Eight buildings house more than 40,000 square feet filled with wood- and metalworking equipment, sewing machines and packing and shipping operations. A new showroom opened last year, and dust rises from a backhoe digging a foundation for a scratch-and-dent store. In October, the company opened a 12,000-square-foot showroom and distribution center in Pennsylvania.

"It's a marketer's nightmare trying to get people to keep little stinging insects," Forrest says. Nevertheless, Brushy Mountain has increased sales every year but one since it opened in 1977. In fact, aside from the bane of many small businesses--health crises for the principals--Brushy Mountain Bee Farm's only major hiccup developed over the last two years as fears of mysterious maladies wiping out honeybees prompted orders to...