South Korean AI device tracks bee pollination activity across 310 smart farms

South Korea's IR52 Jang Yeong-sil Award for week 11 of 2026 has gone to ConnectBee, developed by FarmConnect — a device installed on beehives in smart farms that uses AI to analyse bee pollination activity in real time.

Pollination is the critical link between flower and fruit in greenhouse farming. Even in tightly controlled smart farm environments, poor pollination leads to smaller fruit and reduced yields. Until now, growers had no reliable way to monitor bee activity and relied entirely on intuition.

ConnectBee uses AI to automatically track the number of bee entries and exits, measure the volume of pollen carried in, and distinguish between female and male bees. Kim Su-jin, Director at FarmConnect, said that yield losses from inadequate pollination had long been unavoidable because no technology existed globally to monitor it in real time, and that

ConnectBee was developed as a world first to turn all pollination activity into actionable data.
Development was not straightforward. Bees are small, fast, and tend to fly in clusters, making accurate image recognition difficult. The team's solution was a speed-bump gate structure at the hive entrance — modelled on road traffic calming — that slows bees to pass one at a time, significantly improving recognition quality. The result is over 95% accuracy in bee entry tracking and pollen measurement, with on-device edge processing that requires no external GPU server.

ConnectBee completed development in 2023 and has since been deployed across 310 farms. FarmConnect plans to follow up with an AI autonomous pollination management system combining flowering data with bee activity to automatically control hive entrance openings.

Source: Maiel Business Newspaper