Parse Binary Data Received Through Bluetooth

I have an application that receives data in binary form through bluetooth. I read the data using bluetoothsocket to an byte[]. But i must parse all messages, because they must have an given format and they are in binary.

My solution was to convert byte[] to a string and then split the string and parse all received messages.

An example of the data to parse:
0000000010000001

I should know that the first 8 zeros are the header and 10000001 the real data.

My idea was to create a string that represents -> 0000000010000001 and then split the whole string in one byte and check the value, like:

string1 had 00000000
string2 had 10000001

I know that 8 zeros are the header, therefore string2 has the representation of the data.