SWEET SCIENCE AS HONEY PRODUCTION SLOWS, EX-NASA ENGINEER'S ANALYTICAL MIND KEEPS HIS BEE BUSINESS BUSY.

Byline: BRENT HOPKINS

Staff Writer

FILLMORE - Red Bennett ignored the steadily growing buzz and reached into a box full of seething bees.

He had done it thousands of times before, so the threat of their stingers didn't bother him at all. Smoke wafted from the can at his feet, drifting into the air as the bees swarmed out.

"Hmm," he said with characteristic understatement. "Looks like we've got an angry hive here."

Nearly 30 years ago, this 65-year-old man with a full beard and a soft voice traded the space-age excitement of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the agrarian life of a beekeeper. Today, in the face of an industry-wide slowdown, it's his intensely analytical mind that keeps his bee business busy.

For that first career, Bennett spent eight years in the lab, eventually becoming a senior engineer. He worked on real-time data processing as part of the Surveyor mission to the moon. His efforts helped launch Voyager into the outer reaches of the solar system.

"I really enjoyed the early days in NASA," he said. "They had a lot of money, and I had a lot of fun.... But it just doesn't feel the same now.

"We were dealing with computers on board that had 100,000 times less computing power than that machine on the desk over there. I think that younger people rely too much on technology, not rolling up your sleeves and doing it."

He liked the sleeve-rolling part, but he got bored with the duties of middle management.

So he quit his job in 1977, sold his home in La Canada Flintridge and paid $75,000 to lease some land in Piru to make honey. He had a beekeeper uncle and raised the insects as a hobby; he now thought he could make it into a way of life.

Thus began Bennett's Honey Farm.

"I knew he was doing it on the side, but that was a radical change to go from a guaranteed income to whatever he could make on the bees," said Jim Casson, a retired JPL engineer who worked with Bennett.

"It surprised us that he did it, but it's certainly worked out real well over the years."

Difficult times in the bee business

Currently, the bee business is lousy for other folks. Ventura County's commercial keepers have watched the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder kill off thousands of bees. Throw in a dearth of rain that limited bee births and the freeze that killed off many of the crops the insects normally pollinate, and things look even worse.

"When you're losing 50percent of your product, that's a serious loss," said Alan Laird, deputy agricultural commissioner for Ventura County. "The bees are leaving in a timely fashion to pollinate, but they're not coming back. It's a tough industry."

And yet Bennett, a former Navy man who ended up with a master's degree in engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, doesn't seem worried.

These days, he keeps only 400 colonies himself and makes his money instead on a highly automated, solar-powered honey factory.

Inside its steel walls, he's got a two-year supply of honey stored in drums to insulate himself from the seasonal fluctuations that used to bedevil his business. Rather than relying merely on his bees, he earns income extracting other keepers' supplies and bottling it for sale to markets.

As Ventura County's only packer, he churns out 60,000pounds of product each week. In a good year, he makes more than 3million pounds of honey, more than 2percent of the nation's total output.

"Other beekeepers don't like to extract for other guys, but his whole setup's designed for this," said Gavin Sherman, a keeper and bee science instructor at Cal Poly Pomona. "He's got a reputation around for being extremely trustworthy.

"It's not easy to know how much honey's in the boxes, but I've never heard of any issues with Red. Whatever he tells us he got, that's what we gave him."

First 15 years were a struggle

At one time, Bennett had thousands of bee colonies swarming around the hills off Highway126. He describes his first 15 years in the business as a struggle, with mites, disease and weather taking their toll on his buzzing brood.

In those days, not far removed from his time working with IBM 360s, massive machines that took entire days to calculate one program entered on punch cards, he became a rough-handed manual laborer. He hauled 90-pound bee boxes around, stayed up all night transporting colonies, and slaved over his honey extractors.

Frustrated with the seasonal flux, he moved more into honey in the late '80s, steadily building the business into its current state. A fire three years ago in his Piru facility forced him to move to his current 5-acre spread in Fillmore on Telegraph Road and led to the creation of his solar-powered plant.

With just 12 employees and a high degree of automation, he has streamlined what used to be a long, tedious process. Even in slow times like the present, the factory cranks along, filling jars that end up on the shelves of Whole Foods, Smart & Final and independent markets.

It's not quite the same as the sterile lab days, when rooms crowded with rocket scientists and number crunchers worked for days on end to push mankind's grasp on the solar system.

No, he says, it's better.

"You trade for a certain quality of life that's more appealing for that hard work," said Ann Bennett, his wife and partner in the business.

"You can go outside when you want to. You don't work in a fluorescent world. For some people, that's worth more than getting a paycheck every other week."

brent.hopkins(at)dailynews.com

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CAPTION(S):

Photo:

(1 -- color) Red Bennett, 65, searches a beehive for the quee n bee at Bennett's Honey Farm in Fillmore, where the former NASA engineer's solar-powered honey factory has streamlined what used to be a long, tedious process.

(2 -- color) no caption (honey)

(3) Rod Bennett looks over honey on a straining table at his solar-powered honey farm, which has thrived despite a mysterious disease killing local bees and an overall industry slowdown.

(4) Carlos Cabrera boxes bottles of straight-from-the-bees honey at Bennett's Honey Farm in Filmore on Thursday.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer