Alf Berg uses his bare hands to reach inside a beehive at Blackburn Farm in Colts Neck. A smoking can filled with burning pine needles is his only defense — blocking pheromone communication between bees to prevent them from attacking.

A small swarm of about 50 bees buzzes behind Berg's head. He wears no gauzy beekeeper hat to protect his exposed face and neck. Rather, he relies on care and calm to keep the bees from stinging.

"That's part of having nice bees. These people that put space suits on and gloves on and they're in there squashing their bees . . . the bees tend to get agitated," Berg said.

Berg pulls from the hive a frame that holds about four pounds of honeycomb. Hundreds of bees cover the sticky contents, mere fractions of an inch from his bare fingers.

At the start of his beekeeping career about eight years ago, bees frequently stung him, Berg said. Now, it happens rarely. "I've developed a calmness around the bees now, and that seems to make a big difference," he said.

Berg and his wife Cecelia use the collected wax, honey and pollen from their hives, spread through Ocean and Monmouth counties, for honey, balms and moisturizing products that they sell through their Point Pleasant business, Herbertsville Honey Co.

Though beekeeping is a hobby for them now, the couple hopes to eventually purchase a farm and keep the hives there.

Each of these hives has of a brood "super" or box that serves as a nursery for the queen bee. Honey supers, which look like dresser drawers filled with honeycomb on vertical frames, are stacked on top.

Each hive can produce more than 100 pounds of honey a year, said New Jersey Beekeepers Association President Pete Leighton. Hives need about 60 pounds of honey to get through an average winter, "Anything above that, we can steal," Leighton said.

Winter can prove fatal to bees if they don't have enough honey stored to feed themselves, Berg said. Bees don't hibernate; rather, they cluster in the hive to keep warm, and feed on the stored honey, he said.

In January 2007, New Jersey beekeepers noticed that entire hives were dying at alarming rates, caused by unusually warm weather, they suspect. With some trees flowering, the queen bees started to lay eggs. When temperatures turned colder in February, the newly hatched bees quickly ran through the stores of honey and many colonies starved to death.

That winter, the Bergs lost 30 to 35 hives out of their 50 throughout Ocean and Monmouth counties. They purchased $1,500 to $2,000 worth of packaged bees the following spring to replace the dead colonies.

Other beekeepers were harder hit that winter. "I lost 90 percent of my local bees," said Wayne Sommers, owner of Zenjas Honey Farm in Toms River. "Every year, it seems to get harder and harder to manage to keep them alive," Sommers said, who owns about 1,000 hives in New Jersey and Montana.

Winter is not the only season when colonies starve.

Leighton, who lives in Jackson, has lost hives to starvation in August, he said. "In the Pine Barrens, there's not a lot of forage during the summer," he said. He's currently feeding his bees sugar water until fall-blooming plants flower, he said.

In addition, bees are susceptible to mites, parasites, viruses, insecticides, pesticides and colony collapse disorder — when colonies die for unexplained reasons. It can cost beekeepers thousands of dollars annually to replace lost colonies, by splitting existing colonies or purchasing bees in packages.

Housing development also poses a risk to bees, said Sommers. "We keep losing more and more farms every year," he said. "Every time they put in a new housing project, even if it's a place which hasn't been farmed recently, there goes your wild flowers."

"Years ago, there were wild bees all over nature," said Berg. "But now, due to pathogens and different diseases that the honey bees have, they seldom live for a very long time in the wild."

Mary Kosenski of E & M Gold Beekeepers of Tinton Falls lost more than half of her 100 hives seven years ago when she made the decision to stop treating her bees for mites, she said. "I'm working toward an organic approach," she said.

Mites and a bee disease call foulbrood quickly infected many of her hives. "We had to burn all of the equipment that was associated with that disease."

The decision to stop treatment cost her between $4,000 and $5,000 initially and twice that over the long term, she estimates. "It would certainly be cheaper to treat the bees," she said.

Bees are not only responsible for honey and beeswax production — they also pollinate one-third of the nation's crops. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Agriculture attributed bee pollination to $15 billion in added crop value, and estimated the beekeepers managed 2.4 million colonies in the country.

New Jersey crops such as cranberries, blueberries, apples, pumpkins and cucumbers depend on bees. Without bee pollination, the prices of many fruits and vegetables would be "astronomical" because of crop shortages, Leighton said.

Due to agriculture's dependence on the flying insect and rising concern over colony collapse disorder, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded The University of Georgia $4 million recently to study managed bee colonies over the next four years.

"It's not about the honey," said Berg. "The honey is a side product of pollination."