As they say in tupelo country, the honey is the money.

Mr. Dennard is the founder and head beekeeper of the Savannah Bee Company, which has 13 stores. He sold 37 tons of tupelo last year, some of it to wholesalers and the rest online or in stores. That includes 170 cases of “gold reserve” tupelo that he packages in 20-ounce bottles for $100, each one rolled in a sleeve of Canadian birch and sealed with wax from the same bees that made the honey. You can get it at luxury retailers like Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus.

His reserve on shelves now is from Georgia, and is more than 90 percent pure tupelo. Measuring pollen in a batch of honey can determine whether it contains sufficient quantities of tupelo nectar to qualify as tupelo. The International Commission for Bee Botany requires that honey contain more than 45 percent nectar from a single source in order to be labeled a varietal honey, like acacia or tupelo.

A good honey seller wouldn’t think of selling anything as tupelo that was less than 60 percent, said Mr. Dennard, who regularly sends samples to a German laboratory for testing.

To keep the honey as pure as possible, a beekeeper needs to monitor the day-to-day health of the blossoms and check the frames inside the hives regularly, pulling them out when they are heavy with honey. When the tupelo flowers start to fade, bees will move on to whatever blooms next, which here is often gallberry bushes.

“A lot of the time people send me honey they think is tupelo and it’s mainly gallberry,” said Vaughn Bryant, director of the palynology laboratory at Texas A&M University and by all accounts the nation’s pre-eminent honey tester.