The buzz is extremely loud and incredibly close.

From the backyards of Mount Airy and Germantown to the landscaped lawns of Cherry Hill, an extraordinary number of ordinary folks are taking up beekeeping.

They could be your neighbors - just plain folks you thought you knew pretty well or could safely ignore. Then one day, he or she comes by with a jar of honey as a gift and an "it's from my garden" explanation.

Anna Herman, 48, a food writer and consultant in Mount Airy, got her first hive in March, joining the state's more than 2,400 beekeepers. New Jersey has about 3,000. The number of backyard beekeepers is growing all the time - even the new White House vegetable garden has a hive.

Commercial beekeepers have huge numbers of hives and sell their wares in wholesale or retail outlets. But the vast majority (95 percent) of the nation's 212,000 beekeepers are hobbyists with two or three hives, according to the Department of Agriculture.

"Just in the last year, interest in [hobbyist] beekeeping has grown astronomically," says Jim Bobb, a former hobbyist, who founded the Montgomery County Beekeepers Association, which now has several hundred members. He also tends the bees at Morris Arboretum, the Barnes Foundation, and Pennypack Trust, and maintains observation hives at Longwood Gardens and the Academy of Natural Sciences.

What's the draw? There's the honey, of course. And the satisfaction of a D.I.Y. project. In addition, beekeeping creates another level of pleasure for gardeners. Bees generally travel only two to three miles a day gathering nectar, pollen, and water, so if you grow enough wildflowers, your bees won't stray far. Think of the sustainability.

And since nobody knows exactly why large numbers of bees die each season from colony collapse disorder, the world needs more beekeepers, says Joel Eckel of Germantown, who, with brother Jeff and cousin Abby, work as WeBee Brothers, offering instruction and consultation.

Herman estimates her starting costs at $80 for the empty hive and an additional $85 for bees. They came in a pack - three pounds of drones and workers and one queen.

A hive in nature has the appearance of a web hanging from a tree. A hobbyist's hive resembles a wooden filing cabinet that stands about five feet tall and can sit as close to, or as far from, the house as you'd like.

Instead of drawers that pull out horizontally as in a filing cabinet, a beekeeper's hive consists of stacked boxes called supers. Each super contains 10 mesh frames that pull out from the top. When the time is right, you extract honey from the frames, one super at a time.

Happily ensconced in their new home, Herman's bees got busy making honey. She won't harvest much this summer, her first, because she wants to ensure that the bees have enough to feed themselves through the coming winter. Starting next summer, she can expect 40 or more pounds of honey for her tea and toast.

Sure, it's all a bit more complicated than that. But beginners' courses are offered through 4H clubs as well as beekeepers associations in New Jersey and in Bucks, Chester, and Montgomery counties. If you take a class in the fall or winter, you'll be ready to start in April, which is the ideal time.

The bees do all the work. The keeper checks on the hives every couple of weeks to see that all is well. (That's covered in the classes: How to tell whether all is well, and what to do if it's not.)

On a recent Saturday morning at Wyck, a historic Germantown home that offers training in gardening and beekeeping, as well as a weekly farmers market, Jeff, Joel, and Abby Eckel demonstrated honey extraction for a gathering of about two dozen current and future backyard beekeepers.

As a precaution, the Eckels had removed one super from a hive ahead of time and brought it - sans bees - into the demonstration room.

They made the process seem simple: Hold a frame aloft to see if all or most of the honey-filled cells have been waxed over by the bees. That's a sign that the honey is ready for harvest. Then Abby and Jeff took turns using an electrically heated flat knife to slowly cut the wax away in strips, letting the wax fall into a clean container.

Next, four finished frames went into an extractor - a sealed metal container about the size of a wine barrel - and Joel Eckel turned the hand crank for a couple of minutes until meeting some resistance. That's a sign all the honey is out of the frames. He put a large clean container under the extractor's spout and let the fresh honey flow through a cheesecloth to filter out any remaining wax.

In a good season, each hive will produce 40 to 60 pounds of honey. (About 12 pounds equal one gallon.)

Sweet.