It's a cloudy day, which means Jim Bobb's Italian honeybees - mellow by nature - are hanging out at home, a condo-like colony of 24 hives set up in a field at Morris Arboretum in Chestnut Hill.

Not to worry, assures "the bee guy" from Lansdale, a favorite speaker on the Philadelphia region's flower-show and garden-club circuit and a fixture at beekeeping conferences up and down the East Coast.

"These are happy honeybees," Bobb assures. "They won't sting you." Which is excellent news, because they're beginning to explore a nervous visitor's arms and legs, hands, head, and shoulders.

More on that later.

For now, the less emphasis placed on stinging, the better Bobb likes it. Honeybees, it turns out, get a terrible rap. They're often lumped in with yellow jackets, which are actually wasps and, unlike the peaceful honeybee, relish the unprovoked attack.

No, it's the joy and utility of these essential pollinators, and the fascination they hold for about 5,500 beekeepers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, that is Bobb's focus.

"Honeybees are just so interesting," he says.

Bobb, who has managed more than 100 hives in public and private gardens in Southeastern Pennsylvania over the last decade, will headline a daylong honeybee symposium tomorrow at Temple University Ambler. Novices and experts alike are invited to learn about threats to honeybees, such as the mysterious colony collapse disorder, the ins and outs of beekeeping; strategies for attracting honeybees to the home garden; and honey and hive products.

Bobb's hives, whether for honey production or educational demonstration, can be found on land belonging to the Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust, Wissahickon Valley Watershed Association, and Academy of Natural Sciences, as well as Willow Creek Orchards in Collegeville, the Barnes Foundation, Longwood Gardens, and the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania.

Some of those 100 hives are in the apple orchard at Bobb's home, 14 acres known as Worcester Honey Farms. He also moves his hives around to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops.

Bobb's honey, which is sold throughout this region, is a luminous golden amber. Taste and color are determined by the nectar-rich wildflowers honeybees find when they're out foraging, usually two or three miles from the hive.

But this is no walk in the park. To produce a single pound of the honey we so liberally swish in tea and slather on toast, honeybees need to rack up 55,000 miles and to visit two million blossoms.

This year was tough because of heavy spring and summer rains. Honeybees drown easily, so a lot of them stayed inside, resulting in a drop in honey production. Which is unfortunate for honey-lovers and the bees, who have a lot less food now to get the colony through the winter.

To help out, Bobb's bees are getting supplements of sugar syrup.

Board chairman of the Eastern Apicultural Society, Bobb eagerly shares his knowledge of sugar syrup and royal jelly, queen succession, pollen sacs, and guard bees. It's endlessly fascinating for a guy who had already had a couple of fascinating careers before he settled on bees.

Bobb, 50, grew up on a Worcester Township farm that had been in his family from 1790 to 1976, when it became a Montgomery County park. Known now as the Peter Wentz Farmstead, it served as George Washington's headquarters in 1777.

Bobb now lives across the street, in a house his grandfather built in 1969.

A math and physics major at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Bobb earned a master's degree in math at the University of California at Berkeley, then balanced a daytime job at a global computer-software firm and part-ownership of a Brazilian nightclub called Bahia Tropical, both in San Francisco.

The former took him all over the world. The latter, because his club introduced "the Brazilian dance of love," the lambada, to the United States, earned him spots on Good Morning America and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

After selling both businesses and moving back home in 1996, Bobb began a new chapter of traveling abroad and studying art and horticulture, eventually becoming a master gardener and instructor at the Barnes Foundation and Longwood Gardens.

All of which, you might say, has led to this morning's adventure in the fields at Morris, where Bobb notices the honeybees' increasing interest in his visitor. "Just freeze. Don't swat," he says cheerfully. "It makes them mad."

Yes, every once in a while, these benign creatures, so beloved in the gardening world, go absolutely nuts. "What drives 'em crazy is . . . if I get stung, there's an attack smell. That's what drives 'em crazy," says Bobb, who has been known to keep cool and still while a bee backs slowly out of his ear.

Even so, he has been stung thousands of times, often when he sticks his gloveless hand in a hive. Today, he doesn't get stung. His hapless, honeybee-loving visitor does.

A decidedly unmellow Italian honeybee - there are no native American ones - is hiking through her hair and suddenly gets entangled. As the buzz gets louder, more intense, some reflexive swatting ensues.

Wrong strategy in the textbook, but out here in the field, without a stinger - or missile-defense shield - of your own, it's hard to freeze like a statue when an enraged pollinator is tearing up your hairdo.

Ouch! Direct hit to the forehead. Bobb is there in an instant with his "hive tool," which looks like a tiny crowbar. He scrapes off the stinger. Thankfully, it's the first and last one this dogged little Apis mellifera ligustica will ever launch.

Arrivederci, baby!

If You Go

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Honey Bee Symposium will be held from 8 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. tomorrow at Temple University Ambler. It is cosponsored by Temple and the Montgomery County Beekeepers Association.

Speakers include Jim Bobb, board chairman of the Eastern Apicultural Society, master gardener, and instructor at Longwood Gardens and the Barnes Foundation; Maryann Tomasko Frazier, senior extension associate in the entomology department at Pennsylvania State University, who specializes in apiculture, especially the impact of pesticides; Jenny Rose Carey, director of the landscape arboretum at Temple University Ambler, who also teaches courses in woody plants and the history of landscape architecture; and Mike McGrath, host of WHYY-FM's You Bet Your Garden, a weekly organic-gardening show.

Topics covered include honeybee biology; native pollinators and plants; pesticides and other threats to honeybee health, including the mysterious colony collapse disorder, where honeybees appear to vanish from their home colonies without an obvious cause.

The event will be in the student center auditorium on the Temple campus, 580 Meetinghouse Rd., Ambler. Cost: $40 at the door, plus $12 lunch, if available, and $5 optional tour of plants that attract bees in Temple's display garden.

- Virginia Smith

Read gardening writer Virginia A. Smith's blog at www.philly.com/philly/blogs/

gardening

Contact garden writer Virginia A. Smith

at 215-854-5720 or vsmith@phillynews.com.