TASMANIA, Australia -- There had been reports of a bushfire in the mountains that night, so before dawn, the beekeepers headed west to check on their hives. Like most of the beekeepers in Tasmania, they set up their hives along logging roads in the forest, because their bees collect nectar and pollen from flowering leatherwood trees.

Leatherwood grows only on this heart-shaped island the size of Ireland, a hundred miles south of the Australian mainland and 800 miles west of New Zealand. The trees' small, star-shaped flowers blossom into the autumn, generating 70 percent of the 1,200 tons of honey produced in Tasmania each year.

But today, a battle of trees versus bees is unfolding here. For more than 30 years, timber companies have been energetically converting the forests of this Australian state, which have the tallest and oldest flowering trees in the world, into sawdust and woodchips, which are shipped primarily to Japan. The loggers want the huge eucalyptus, but like dolphins caught in a tuna net, the leatherwood, Huon and King Billy pines that grow alongside them are harvested as well. The loggers then firebomb the forests to clear out the debris, a process that can lead to runaway "regeneration burns" and inadvertently destroy nearby leatherwood, and threaten the hives.

If the logging of leatherwood isn't limited, the beekeepers warn, not only will their livelihood disappear, but so will the world's only source of leatherwood honey, which has a sharp, musky flavor similar to honey from chestnuts or thyme.

The wind was sharp with wood smoke as the beekeepers headed inland from Hobart. At the wheel of the Subaru Outback was Hedley Hoskinson, 69 years old, a wiry semiretired beekeeper who, with his wife, Hazel, manages 100 hives. The descendant of convicts and the son of a lake-country shepherd, he got an early start in the business.

"I got my first hive when I was 9," said Mr. Hoskinson, steering around the bodies of wallabies, wombats and bush-tail possums that had risked the treacherous trek to the river's edge. A voracious, meat-eating Tasmanian devil that had been dining on this smorgasbord was among the road kill. "I'm the last of the first," Mr. Hoskinson said.

Also on board was John Duncombe, a rugged, soft-spoken sheep farmer with 2,000 head of sheep, four kids and 500 hives. At 40, he's one of the youngest. "My sons won't be beekeepers," he said. "There won't be enough leatherwood left." After decades of lumbering, the forests have retreated, and so have the hives. The trees thrive in the protected mountains and valleys of the World Heritage area, which are off-limits to loggers and inaccessible to beekeepers.

"We're not against forestry, just the way they do it," said Mr. Duncombe. "The loggers say, 'we're running a business.' Well, we're running a business, too." The 206 commercial beekeepers in Tasmania's apiary industry generate between $2 million and $4 million in revenue and pollination services that sustain $145 million in crops.

Forestry Tasmania, a trade group representing the $1 billion timber industry, says that beekeepers benefit from the logging roads, and that plenty of leatherwood is in protected forests. "Where possible, leatherwood-rich areas are excluded from harvesting, or are incorporated into streamside reserves that are protected from harvesting and regeneration burning," said a spokesman in a statement.

After a couple of hours of driving, the beekeepers came to 40 stacks of white boxes lined up on the edge of the forest. There was no sign of any fire. The bees, all females, will make 168,000 trips to collect a gallon of nectar. Each bee will gather nectar steadily for three weeks until, worn out, she will drop to the ground and die.

There was fire up ahead. The beekeepers soon arrived at the clear-cut hillsides that had been burned the week before. Tree limbs and stumps were still smoldering. The area will likely be replanted with eucalyptus -- and laced with poison bait to kill wildlife that might try to eat the seedlings. In the distance, a helicopter was dropping water on a burning stretch of forest.

Down the road, the beekeepers stopped by another set of hives, and followed the bees under the canopy of the trees. The eucalyptus created a ceiling more than 200 feet high, arching above a hall of myrtle, leatherwood and Fagus, a native beech whose tiny leaves turn gold in the fall. Thanks to the 100 inches of rain dumped annually by trade winds, the trees and fallen logs were covered by a dozen types of lichen and moss.

It was time to refuel. At a road junction, they bypassed the golden arches of a McDonald's and headed to their preferred venue, Banjo's, a home-grown cafe chain.

After tea and scones, they passed north through the midlands, where the once-fertile hills are suffering from a mysterious dieback. The disease has killed the giant gum trees, leaving their huge white skeletons standing. "Nothing but bandicoots can live here now," said Mr. Hoskinson.

The beekeepers believe Tasmania's future lies in tourism, not timber. Last year, about 400,000 tourists, mostly Australian, spent about $1 billion visiting its wilderness, wineries and snowy highlands. Tourism and sustainable industries, including honey, go hand-in-hand, the beekeepers say. They've rallied support from farmers, who need the bees to pollinate their orchards and crops, as well as wooden-boat builders and furniture makers, who complain they can't get enough Huon, myrtle and sassafras for their craft.

Dusk was setting in when they reached Blue Hills Honey, a farm in Mawbanna, in the far northwest. As two little marsupials -- a pademelon and a potoroo -- skipped by, hundreds of white cockatoos flocked to a dead tree to roost. Nicola Charles, 38, who runs the farm with her husband, Robbie, 40, set out a plate of scones and mugs of tea.

Like other family-run Tasmanian facilities, the farm uses a cool-extraction process that produces a mousse-like texture and preserves the honey's odd flavor. Pasteurized mass-produced honey, on the other hand, can be syrupy and bland. Mrs. Charles, who had been an intensive-care nurse in London before returning to her hometown to marry the beekeeper she grew up with, hopes that as more foreigners develop a palate for artisanal honey like leatherwood, the government will take more steps to protect it.

The beekeepers made little headway complaining about logging until Simon Pigot, a beekeeper with a Ph.D. in computer imaging, noticed that the government's maps, which are based on aerial photography, underreported leatherwood. Because leatherwood grows under taller trees, some people were underestimating how much of it was being logged, he said.

Last month, the government said it would finance more logging roads, which it said would help create more hive sites, and set aside more forests in reserves. But the beekeepers say that will make little difference since the reserves include land with little leatherwood.

Just then, a power outage plunged the farm into darkness, but by the greenish glow of a laptop, the beekeepers continued to study the NASA satellite map of Tasmania's forests that they had downloaded. Said Mr. Pigot: "The way things are going, in the south we've got about 10 years of commercial production left."