Bees - Cucumberic life without bees

The worlds bee population is in the process of being wiped out.

It's called "Colony Collapse Disorder",  which is the kind of name doctors tend to give things when they have no idea what the problem is, but want to be able to refer to it in an unambiguous manner that makes other people feel they know what the're talking about.

 Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD is wiping out VERY large numbers of honey bee hives. People that keep bees professionally have closed up shop after losing all their bees.

A while ago, a clerk at the patent office named Albert said, "If all the bees were to disappear,  humans would have 4 years before we were wiped out.", but as far as I know he wasn't a bee expert, but was a very clever man.

The reality is that bees make food grow. almost all our food crops rely on the honey bee to make their fruit, nuts and seeds. Without them we will either learn to eat grass and ferns, or die.

In the last half of this summer, we have not seen a single bee.

I've been looking for them, and I'm pretty good at looking.

I hand pollinated half my cucumber flowers with a small artists paint brush, and left the other half to nature, and not one of natures flowers bore fruit.

Not one.

I'm trying to arrange some native blue banded bees to try to fix the problem.

Some time ago I set up a time lapse photography shot of some cucumbers that I thought I had hand pollinated, but half way through the shoot, I realised I had the memory stick that was for the camera on my desk.

Oh well. At least it wasn't as big a fail as the idiot that coded the little beep noise that tells you it's working. Their design work means the device continues to make the I've just taken a picture "beep" even when there's no card in the device.

Clever.

Anyway...

Here's some time lapse of the second setup where I used the plants that were not being hand pollinated. Pay particular attention to the 3 already formed little cucumbers just to the right of centre. (sorry about all the black dead space at the end, youtube's edit says it doesn't exist so you must be imagining it just like me) ...




youtube is giving me some grief. The clip works around 50% of the time in the different ways I test stuff.

This might work http://youtu.be/z85OlJScCEE

If it's not fixed soon I'll redo it.

Photography - Rock melon time lapse

 thought I might do a time lapse of a rock melon developing.

I'm not sure why, but I like rock melon a lot.

The might be called cantaloupe in your part of the world.

Either way, I have some growing.

The shot looks a bit like this.

 The white splodge at the bottom is the time lapse camera.

It's facing toward the extremity of the rock melon vine centre top.

The plan is to capture a rock melon forming from scratch.

Apparently I have around a month. With that time in mind, I've set the camera to take a frame every so often.

I really dont know how often, but having set it up, I'm loathe to change anything because it would mean the loss of all the pics to date.

That's the big problem with this camera. You don't really know when it's working or not. It even pretends to be working when there is no memory card installed. That means it seems to be working, and it only takes a month before you realise the thing doesn't have a card in place.

One month to take a picture of nothing.

Oh well. It hasn't happened so far, so I guess it isn't really a problem.

This is the topic up close.

Currently it's a hand fertilized flower in the last stages of it's flowery existence.

Hopefully, over the next few weeks, we will see a rock melon grow to harvest.

If not, there is a strawberry runner incoming from stage left that might make for a decent set of time lapse images.



Or not.

Who knows?

A month or so from now, all will be revealed.



120 Things in 20 years - Bringing you time lapse images of rock melons. That's it really. Time lapse images of rock melons.

Photography - My first time lapse

13 days of Sweet Romano Peppers sprouting.

Photography - Time lapse camera

Someone nice gave me a new camera today.

Thanks someone nice.

It does time lapse photography.

You set it to take a shot every 30 seconds or whatever (30 seconds to 990 minutes), and when you feel like it, you turn it off pull out the memory card, and knit them all together with some software * so you have a movie.

It looks like this.

I've played around with it a bit, and so far the results are excellent.

It was given to me, so I have no idea how much it cost, but they tend to be called "garden cams". A search for "garden cam" will see you on the right track.

With a name like that, clearly they want me to film some aquaponics growth.

Mine is made in china and the box is labelled "Live Cam".  If you do a search for "Live Cam", you get a list of every porn site in the world.




I cant endorse it, or any of the garden cam things mentioned, because I dont know how much mine cost, I haven't used any others, and I never said I would, but I'm pretty stoked at having one to play with. From the size of the jpg's it makes, It's around a three mega pixel camera, so it should make for a reasonably decent film. It's not going to be Imax or anything, but it should be a few million times better than your average liquor store hold up security camera footage.

I suspect it will end up pointing aft, mounted on the back of my little boat for the duration of my planned, epic Murray River adventure.

I've really got to get to work on that boat.

Anyway, this version has a micro SD card slot which means it can hold up to 32 gig of pictures. I just worked out how many 4 meg photo's that is, but I closed the calculator without looking at the result, and I never go back.

So...

You'll have to work that out for yourselves.

It should hold a day's worth, and hopefully the batteries will also last a day at least. I suspect the camera goes into a sleep mode (otherwise the 990 minute setting would be a little pointless) where it doesn't draw a lot of power, but I'll be taking my trusty laptop (that was ripped from the jaws of landfill, and must be 20 years old), so charging (via USB) and emptying the memory shouldn't be an issue. Although, come to think of it, I think the new camera has more memory than the old laptop.

I'll work something out.

On a side note, and interestingly, you can drag a photo of a product into a web page showing google images, and it will search the net for images that match. I recently used it to find all the different labels that my new tent is manufactured under to see how much I got ripped off. (turns out I didn't)

But generally speaking it's a good thing to do before you buy rather than after to see if you got ripped off.

So, if you want to buy a toaster that burns tomorrows weather forecast into your toast, the same device might be marketed under three different labels, at three different price points. The exact same device, made in the same factory, not some kind of poorer quality knockoff.

It's a crazy, crazy world in which we live.

So get the photo, and save it to your desktop, then open google search, then click "images". ie go to google image search. Now grab your pic from the desktop, or another browser tab (you don't have to save it to your desktop (in chrome at least), and drag it into google image search.

It will find all the other versions and brands of your product that are using the same, or similar promotional pics.

Try it with the next product you buy, and depending on where you shop, you may be pleasantly surprised, or utterly disgusted with the universe at large.

You can also try it with a person's image, but it might make you sad. Most peoples's secret lives are very, very, boring.

Stupid universe.




*I use OpenShot Video Editor - a free, open-source video editor for Linux licensed under the GPL version 3.0





120 Things in 20 years - Photography - Time lapse camera. We humans are just like ants, but with no sense of humour.

Photography - Time lapse caterpillars

My old phone's camera didn't quite behave as it should have.

Each time it went on to the charge cycle it would shut down the camera.

I did manage to get some photos, although I haven't yet explored ways to knit the individual photo's into a video stream.


I had plans of rigging the phone to the back of the boat for my epic Murray River adventure, and adding as large a memory card as I could.

That way I hoped to be able to catch the entire journey, how ever long it might turn out to be.



I think I'll still want to do something along those lines, but now I might have to buy a purpose built device to achieve the same thing.

It's a shame my little test run didn't work, because in the end the caterpillars started to do the transition thing.

It's not very clear because they moved too close to the lens, but they have started to lay down silk to make somewhere to live while they become whatever it is they are going to become.



















120 Things in 20 years - Making the sacrifice of wearing dirty clothes, so that the reader might enjoy failed, but shake free, caterpillar time lapse photography, foolishly set up on top of the washing machine.