F34 Beekeeper Assist

Alejandro Jauregui is a veteran who now works as a commercial beekeeper. He lost both of his legs during his service. While his current prostheses allow him to fully complete his work, he has found that inspection of the bee boxes causes him severe hip and back pain. Bee box inspection is a critical task for beekeeping, especially since he maintains about 200 hives every day. Our senior project team was tasked with designing and building a device that would help him move the top bee box out of the way to allow for inspection. We performed preliminary research into existing devices, existing practices, and Mr. Jauregui himself to better understand the scope of work for this project. We filtered these inputs into quantifiable wants and needs and generated an actionable problem statement. We followed a timed-out plan which determined what steps we will take to complete this project. As of this report, we have fully completed our final design and fully manufactured the device. We developed and performed test procedures that verified the device’s functionality. From these steps, we now have a device that we know meets all of Mr. Jauregui’s specifications and will greatly improve his quality of life