His wife, Carole, said she was awaiting a final coroner's report, but initial indications are that he died of a heart attack after having an allergic reaction to a bee sting.

Seeking to maintain a rural life, Mr. Jones and his wife moved to Wilton from Sacramento in 1986, and he quickly became involved in the community. He was appointed to fill a vacancy on the Wilton Fire Protection District board of directors in March 2002 and had been the board's chairman for the past year.

During that time, he presided over many heated meetings and often joked that if residents were unhappy with the job he was doing they were free to throw him out of office at the next election.

But many residents believed the troubles in the department had little to do with Mr. Jones and were more about the difficulty of maintaining a small volunteer department in an area that is increasingly being consumed by creeping suburbanization.

Mr. Jones saw his role as maintaining a separate identity for Wilton, while paving the way for a future in which the department's management could be taken over by a neighboring professional department, like the Elk Grove or Sacramento Metropolitan fire districts.

"We're becoming a little too big a fish for our pond, but we're a real small guppy in their huge lake," Mr. Jones told The Bee in September. "We're having to switch puddles."

Wilton has recently seen an influx of new residents from urban and suburban areas who are used to greater levels of fire service, putting pressure on the volunteer department to change.

"His whole motto was do the right thing," Carole Jones said. "The stress from that worried him so much."

In 1980, Mr. Jones began a pest control firm in the Elk Grove area with his younger brother, Steve. The company later moved to Rancho Cordova.

Carole Jones said her husband's apparent reaction to a bee sting was surprising, since he had been stung many times in the course of business.

On Tuesday, he was stung while driving an all-terrain vehicle near Grant Line Road. A road crew saw him slump over and called an ambulance, family friend Betsy Hite said.

Mr. Jones had been a past president of the Cosumnes River Little League and a member of the Cosumnes Community Planning Advisory Council and the Wilton-Cosumnes Parks and Recreation Advisory Council.

"Al didn't know how to say 'no,' " Hite said. "He was absolutely committed to the betterment of the community."

Mr. Jones was very active in the lives of his children Heather, 17, and Brad, 14. Hite said Mr. Jones and his wife would alternate between watching each child's school sports games and remain in contact with each other through cell phone updates.

"They'd literally be on the cell phones with each other: 'OK, well, Brad's going up to bat.' ... It was just hysterical. They are the most dedicated parents I have ever known," Hite said.

The Jones family still keeps cattle on the 27 acres they own in Wilton with Mr. Jones' mother, who lives in a separate house on the property.