HOPKINTON Winter is in the air outside the Ashaway home of Steve and Sherry Ornberg, despite the warm afternoon sun.

The scent of burning wood chips gives off a brisk woodstove feeling, and if the gazillion honeybees who live here could sing, there might be a chorus of “Let It Snow!” ascending from this backyard.

The bees are ready. Bring winter on.

“Look at all that honey,” Steve Ornberg says, admiring a honeycomb-covered frame he removed from the hive. “This colony is in good shape, and it’s just what they need for the winter.”

All around him, busy bees are bringing back the last of the local nectar, setting themselves up for the winter, when they’ll cluster around each other in something of an extended doze. Their keepers will keep an eye on their honey supply, making sure that they’ve squirreled away enough of it to last until spring.

If not, the Ornbergs, proprietors of Ashaway Apiary, will have to provide something of a food bank for bees, offering them sugar syrup until the bees can forage on their own and start producing again.

And after 10 years of learning the ins and outs of beekeeping, the Ornbergs know that in order to keep their bees in good shape, they’ll need to guard them from extreme wind, predators and disease.

“Bees take a lot of management,” says Steve Ornberg, covered with a veiled helmet as he checked on his hives.

ORNBERG CAME home with the idea of keeping bees after visiting his beekeeper friend, Louis J. Chasse of North Kingstown, proprietor of Arson Alley Apiary.

“It just looked interesting, something different,” he says.

So he started out with a few thousand bees of his own, and before long he was stung by a new hobby.

“It never gets boring, but it’s a lot of work.”

It’s not the typical work of pet and owner. There isn’t any petting and grooming going on here, there isn’t any checking for skin diseases or dental problems, and these bees won’t pay you back in happy woofs or gentle figure eights around your ankles. More likely they’ll nip at your neck if threatened, but Ornberg says, “they’re not aggressive like yellowjackets.”

Yellowjackets bug him.

Honeybees give back — in pounds of honey gathered for the Ornbergs to strain, bottle, use and sell.

Despite keeping thousands of working bees in three locations, the Ornbergs say that after they tally up the expenses, they probably spend more money than they bring in from this hobby.

But they say it with a smile. And they keep at it.

To bee or not to bee? There has never been a question.

WITH JOBS TO tend, a daughter to raise, a large Ashaway yard to keep, two dogs, and other areas of personal interest, it would seem the Ornbergs wouldn’t need anything more to keep them busy. But they took on this hobby not only for the fun of it, but also to make their contribution to the environment, and the education of a curious public.

“The educational part of it is very important to us,” says Sherry.

“We like to show kids that honey doesn’t come from a squeeze bottle on the grocery store shelf,” Steve adds.

The Ornbergs spend much of their free time at farmers’ markets and local fairs — such as the one they’ll have a booth at this weekend, Swamp Yankee Days — arriving with a display hive, handout sheets of information and bottles of honey. They take vacation time in summer to do the same at the five-day long Washington County Fair.

“He does most of the work,” Sherry says.

“She does the retail part of it,” Steve says.

“It’s a team effort,” he adds.

They bring movies and computers with them, “to show people just how it operates,” Sherry says. “Did you know that one third of our food has to be pollinated?”

She produces a sheet of bee facts:

• A honey bee makes 154 trips for one teaspoon of honey;

• Bees consume seven pounds of honey to secrete one pound of beeswax

• Actual weigh-ins have shown that it takes about 20,000 trips to bring in a pound of nectar from the flowers and blossoms.

“It’s a very structured society, and it gets very complicated,” says Steve.

But he and Sherry studied and read, tested and tried. Now they spill out the information confidently, producing a scrapbook to illustrate specific points of beekeeping, and the benefits of honey.

AFTER TAKING ON bees as a hobby, the Ornbergs expanded their operation, setting up hives in two other locations, one so the bees can pollinate an orchard, and the other just because the landowner liked the look of the hives.

The Ornbergs check the hives frequently. “You can’t leave them unattended,” says Steve.

And when the time comes to harvest the honey, it has to be done, “until it’s done,” says Sherry. “It has to be bottled and labeled. Weekends can be very busy.”

“Setting up was a monumental task,” says Steve.

May through October, the Ashaway couple have little time to relax around their backyard pool.

But from his workshop, he produced the couple’s white wooden hives and designed labels for the honey jars. He is able to keep watch from windows just beside the honeybee yard.

A stray bee lands on the windowsill. Both Sherry and Steve notice it, offering encouraging words to send it back to its own environment.

“Come on, go home,” Steve tells it, as if talking to a wayward dog. It departs, blending in with the hundreds of others still at work, seeking what flowers are still in bloom in their neighborhood, bringing home the nectar.

When winter begins in earnest, they’ll cluster together in the hives to order to maintain the temperature necessary for their survival. And they’ll have the Ornbergs as backups, checking on the bees’ well-being.

If all goes as planned, the process will start over again in the spring.

THE RHODE ISLAND Beekeepers Association has a mailing list of more than 200 people who either pursue beekeeping as a hobby or business, or are interested in doing so. Ornberg says the association runs a school for beekeeping beginners in March.

The National Honey Board, which lists September as National Honey Month, suggests visiting www.beeculture.com for general beekeeping information.

But for a personal lesson, the proprietors of Ashaway Apiary will be at the Rotary Club of Chariho’s 15th annual Swamp Yankee Days Festival on Saturday and Sunday. They’ll offer not only honey, but also their knowledge of backyard beekeeping.

The bees they bring to the festival will be under glass, unlike the ones in their yard.

“This time of year, they know winter is coming,” says Steve, “and they are being very defensive of what they have. I have to suit a little more carefully.

“Honey production is coming to an end.”

Steve and Sherry will soon go off to their day jobs, he as a textile colorist and she as a gemologist, taking something of a rest from the bees, and the bees taking a rest from them, each party content in this Ashaway honeybee yard.

Their 30-hour-a-week obligation will dwindle down like the afternoon sun, their twin sighs of relief competing with the sighs of a million bees. Begone, summer. It’s time for a rest.

Swamp Yankee Days will be held from 10 a.m. to dusk Saturday and Sunday at Crandall Field, Route 3, Ashaway. In addition to experiencing the Ornbergs’ honeybees up close and personal, the event will also feature chowder and clamcakes, music, pumpkin painting, hay rides, a baked bean eating contest, children’s craft activities, crafts, exhibits, an antique tractor parade, and cow chip bingo. For information call (401) 539-7508.

afleming@projo.com