Quantifying bee pollen loads to determine pollination success… Over 95% accuracy across three official test items 

FarmConnect (CEO Kim Mu-hyeon), a company specializing in AI analysis of precision agriculture and smart farm data, announced that its in-house developed "Edge AI-Based Bumblebee Pollination Activity Diagnosis Technology" has obtained New Excellent Technology (NET) certification in agriculture and food from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs.

Until now, monitoring of pollinating bees has remained at the level of counting the number of entries and exits from the hive or observing internal temperature and humidity, leaving no way to confirm whether pollination had actually taken place.

The certified technology collects video of bumblebees entering and exiting through a tunnel-type structure and camera installed at the hive entrance. A Raspberry Pi-based edge AI analyzes this video in real time to distinguish individual bees and track their movement trajectories. Pollen attached to the bees' legs is detected via bounding boxes and then quantified down to the pixel level through a segmentation-based statistical model. On top of this, the system integrates bee entry/exit patterns with farm environmental data to diagnose the causes of poor pollination, dividing them into environmental anomalies such as high temperature and humidity imbalance, and bee-related problems such as population decline, aging, and an increase in drones. Recommended actions are delivered immediately to farms via web and app notifications. The technology has been applied to ConnectBee, FarmConnect's pollination monitoring product.

FarmConnect received high marks for achieving high-precision analytical performance without any separate high-specification equipment, by combining its own tunnel-type structure (HW) with edge AI video analysis software (SW). The company completed a lightweight architecture that identifies both individual bees and pollen without a GPU, and measures entry/exit patterns and pollen volume in real time without high-speed video processing.

Verified by a testing and certification institution, the technology demonstrated accuracy of over 95% in measurement items related to bee entry/exit and pollen.

Founded in 2019, FarmConnect is ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute) research institute company No. 1030, and has supplied its smart farm integrated control and environmental analysis system to more than 850 farms in Korea and abroad. The company won a CES Innovation Award in 2025 and an IR52 Jang Young-sil Award in 2026, and has been recognized for its technological capabilities by completing patent registrations in seven countries including Korea, the U.S., China, Japan, and Eurasia, and filing patent applications in 28 countries worldwide including the EU and Canada.

Kim Mu-hyeon, CEO of FarmConnect, said, "This is the first time in Korea that a technology has received national-level certification for quantifying, through pollen volume, how much pollination actually took place rather than how many times bees went in and out," adding, "Using this certification as a stepping stone, we will expand domestic adoption and begin full-scale overseas expansion of K-smart farm technology."