NDSU professor receives NSF CAREER award
North Dakota State University assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering, Sulaymon Eshkabilov, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program award.
NSF CAREER Awards support early-career faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through the integration of research and education. The $650,000, five-year award will focus on research efforts to help save the honey bee population. Eshkabilov will study the modeling, identification and prediction of honey bee responses, and his study comes at a critical time for honey bees.
A survey conducted by Project Apis M, a nonprofit organization supporting science that advances beekeeping in the U.S. and Canada, discovered that commercial beekeepers in the United States lost 62 percent of their colonies from June 2024 to February 2025. North Dakota plays a vital role in meeting the nation’s pollination demands as the nation’s leading honey-producing state.
Eshkabilov notes that research on honey bee health and communication systems is especially critical today as honey bees across the United States are encountering escalating threats and declines.
According to the United Nations Environment Program, which coordinates international efforts to address climate, biodiversity loss, pollution and sustainable development, more than 35 percent of global crop production depends on pollinators such as honey bees.
In addition, USDA statistics show that about 2.6 million honey bee colonies pollinate more than $15 billion of annual crops in the United States.
“The NSF CAREER award is one of the most prestigious grants that tenure-track faculty can secure, and it is a mark of accomplishment for Sulaymon’s scholarship and proposed education programs,” said NDSU vice president for research and creative activity Colleen Fitzgerald. “The award also adds to NDSU’s preeminence in pollinator research and in Ag Tech, securing federal funds to advance a topic essential to the prosperity of North Dakota producers.”
Eshkabilov has been in his current position at NDSU since 2021 and was a visiting scientist/professor at the university from 2018-2020.
As Eshkabilov explains, this project will enable the development of new research programs at NDSU that will help decode the loss of essential pollinators.
“Receiving the CAREER award is an incredible honor,” he said. “It both recognizes the research I’m conducting on honey bees and reaffirms the vital importance of pollinator health to our food systems, our environment, and our economy.”
CAREER awards can have a broad and meaningful impact. Eshkabilov sees a long-term vision for utilizing his research's latest technologies and processes.
“This award will significantly strengthen my ability to build a robust research program aimed at developing AI-powered, smart monitoring systems to decode how honey bees communicate, especially in response to stress and health challenges. By listening to the bees, quite literally through their vibroacoustic signals, we can detect early warning signs of colony distress and act before it’s too late.”
Vibroacoustic signals are vibrations and sounds that honey bees utilize to communicate within their colonies. Eshkabilov’s research will examine how the bees respond to environmental changes by studying individual and collective response signals. He aims to create a new method to monitor bee health using wireless sensor network systems with Edge AI capabilities to monitor beehives accurately.
In 2023, researchers from NDSU met Joseph Rinehart, the lead scientist at the USDA Entomology Research Unit. The group discussed morbidity bee rates of 5-10 percent during transportation of honey bee colonies from North Dakota to the West Coast.
This discussion sparked Eshkabilov's interest in honey bee research.
“With a background in experimental vibration studies, I became particularly intrigued by how honey bees use their vibroacoustic sensing systems to communicate and express stress or health conditions,” he said. “I am now committed to exploring how we can decode these natural signals to monitor better and support honey bee well-being, especially under the pressures of modern agricultural practices.”
The response signals of bees when bees are disturbed, and AI-based data analysis models of the bee response signals can tell much about what’s going on inside the hive and within a bee colony.
“My research aims to better understand how honey bees respond to changes in their environment — external disturbances, mechanical vibrations, noises, air quality and biotic stresses such as pathogenic ailments, varroa mites and others — by studying their movements and individual and collective response signals,” Eshkabilov said.
“The goal is to use their response information to track the health change dynamics of the overall colony, detect their stress levels, and predict when swarming is about to happen. These results will help beekeepers determine actions they should take to protect colonies and improve their productivity.”
Doctoral student Brady Lindsey is working with Eshkabilov. Lindsey’s grandfather has been a beekeeper for over two decades, which sparked his interest in honey-bee research.
"Our experimental research aims to understand honey bee health using non-contact measurements from a laser vibrometer to monitor the health conditions of honey bee colonies,” he said. “We are trying to understand what frequencies and magnitudes interfere with the honey bee's normal behaviors. The opportunity to be a part of this research and potentially solve problems in field beekeeping is the most exciting part for me.”
Protecting honey bee populations directly benefits North Dakota by sustaining its leading honey production industry and supporting the longevity of a crucial crop pollinator vital for agriculture and food production.
Eshkabilov points out that, if successful, the models he’s creating will help refine the science of beekeeping.
“The models we anticipate creating will facilitate and promote the science of precision beekeeping and monitoring, which will help producers better control the health conditions of their honey bee colonies,” he said. “The envisaged results of the research will serve to save millions of honey bees, enhance the pollination of crops and increase the productivity of honey bees and honey production. And most importantly, this research project will also train the next generation of scientists and engineers in this important research.”
Eshkabilov’s research is supported by NSF award #2438295.