The associate professor of computer science has been with Utah State University for 16 years and has spent half of that time as a beekeeper in Cache Valley.
In 2014, equipped with a Raspberry Pi — a tiny computer based on a single printed circuit board — and various senors, microphones and other hardware, the BeePi was born and put into use in an empty hive box to begin testing the processes and code written by Kulyukin.
“There is an emerging consensus that electronic beehive monitoring is the way to go, so it can help extract critical data from the hive without disturbing the hive,” Kulyukin said, sitting next to one of his four hives.