The Birds and the Bees

One of my bird feeders is for the orioles. The feeder is a flat container that hangs from a hook. It holds sugar water that the birds get to through holes near the perches. And it has some little depressions where we're supposed to put some grape jelly, one of their favorite treats. I've used this feeder for several years and, until this year, it hasn't been used by bees.

Something changed.

Bees have taken over the oriole feeder. It takes them little time to eat all of the grape jelly I put out for the orioles. I wonder if the beekeepers are bewildered with their purple honey. The bees also are fighting the hummingbirds for their nectar. Hummingbirds don't take guff from nobody so they still seem to be getting their share.

My big dollops of grape jelly don't last the day. Since the stuff goes from blob to nothing in a matter of hours I thought that this is a subject for a time-lapse movie.

I learned a lesson from previous videos of bird feeders. That is that things hanging from hooks sway and twist and aren't the best subjects for time-lapse movies. For this video, I took the feeder's hook off and set the feeder on an upside down garbage barrel. This way, the subject doesn't jerk around and the action is easier to follow.

The day before I made this video I put a bowl on the garbage pail and put some jelly in it. I wanted to get the bees accustomed to a new location so they would be ready to follow the food when I moved the nectar/jelly feeder the next day. The bees didn't care much for the jelly in the bowl but the orioles were happy with it. The day of the video I put a clock, the feeder and the bowl of jelly on trash can.

I thought I set the camera to use an exposure that would be good for the full sun period. I was wrong. It got terribly overexposed. Fortunately, after a while I decided to reframe the shot just to watch the feeder. I fixed the exposure settings for the rest of the movie.

I started with the camera taking a picture every 30 seconds. When I saw that the jelly wasn't going to make it till the end of the day I changed the frequency to a picture every 15 seconds. That's when I fixed the exposure and zoomed in on the feeder.

I can't really say what the frame rates I play things back are. After I made the initial segments of the video and put them together, I adjusted the segments' speeds a bit to make the movie last as long as the music I chose. You're probably getting tired of the same music over and over again but this time it is so much more appropriate than my earlier uses of the tune.

Watch in HD and full-screen for best bees.



Here are some stills from the video.

Female Bullock's Orioles

Male Bullock's Oriole