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

Paint Your Wagon

Jerry decided that now is a good time to give the family room a fresh look. That starts with a new coat of paint.

Here you get to see half of the room get its first new coat. The "Cheery" is being covered by "Cancun Sand." People get paid to come up with the names for paint colors.

I put the camera with its fisheye lens on top of the cabinet on one side of the room and recorded the action of the other side getting painted. I had the camera take a picture every 10 seconds. The video shows them played at a rate of 24 frames per second. That works out to show four minutes each second.

I somehow managed to mess up the focus. I started taking the pictures then realized that I had the camera set to take large pictures. That resolution isn't needed for even HD videos and makes the time to process such large images go way up. So I changed the resolution of the pictures while it was shooting and must have bumped the focusing ring. Sorry.

Because this is out of focus, there's probably no need to watch in HD. It's there if you want but why bother?

Cactus Flower, Part III

Last week, I took an afternoon off to watch the last-of-a-lifetime transit of Venus. While I was getting ready for that event I noticed that three buds in my cactus patch were about to open.

You might remember an earlier video where two blossoms were ready to open on the same cactus but they opened on consecutive nights. I was kind of hoping they'd have opened together. But I got to record one opening while another was closing. Another of my videos shows one flower opening and closing in one take.

I was lucky to be home in time to record three flowers opening together. I set the camera up and recorded the action from about 3:15 (the transit had started but I couldn't yet see it with my eclipse filter) till 10:20. I put my desk lamp on an upside down trash can next to the tripod and had it on all the time. That way, when the sun went down the desk lamp lit the scene and the camera adjusted itself to keep things pretty uniformly exposed. Ain't technology grand? The blossom looking head-on into the camera does get overexposed, but I still think technology is grand.

These flowers have always lasted less than a day. Usually, when I come home from work the day after a flower opened it is has already drooped. This time they were still in their full glory the next evening. I decided that they must be ready to wilt so I set the camera up again to record their demise. They were still open when I went to bed. I left the camera clicking through the second night and through the next day until just after the third sunset.

You might remember that one of my earlier videos watched a blossom on a cactus that was lying on the ground.

It seems that these cactuses spread not only by seeds but by breaking when they get top-heavy and taking root where the pieces land. New plants sprout all along the length of the fallen piece.

The end of this video illustrates that method of propagation.

For the first evening, I took pictures every two seconds and they're played back at a rate of 15 frames per second. The second segment was shot a picture every second and play back at 30 frames per second. The video shows an hour every two seconds.

As usual, it's best in HD and full screen!

Twin Peaks, Part 3

We got a new coffee gadget...a Hario Cold Water Coffee Dripper!

A year or so ago there was an article in The New York Times that introduced us to the concept of cold-water extraction of coffee. I can't find that article but here is their illustration of the products described in it. The brief description says that the cold water dripper makes coffee that is "dense and sweet, almost like aged rum." That sounded good.

The contraption has a reservoir and a valve that lets you slowly drip water through the grounds beneath it. The water goes through the grounds, picking up the their goodness, and drips into the pot at the bottom. We're supposed to set the valve to let out 1 to 1.5 drips per second. This is supposed to leave behind some unpleasant parts of the coffee that hot water extracts. The instructions say the process takes about five hours to complete.

A five-hour process that doesn't have a lot of action is a natural subject for a time-lapse movie, don't you think? I did. Here it is!

It took longer than five hours. My drips took more than a second to drop. It ended up taking nearly seven hours.

I started taking pictures at a rate of one per second. After a while I increased the interval to take a picture every other second. Then I periodically increased the interval to take a picture every four, eight, 16, 32 and finally every 64 seconds. The first three-and-a-half-hours of the action take a minute to see and the other 3½ hours take nine seconds.

The video looks a lot better on YouTube's page when you watch it in HD and full screen than in the embedded player below. But for your convenience, here it is.

What you see is about four servings for us. I don't know how to describe flavors but "aged rum" might not be too much of an exaggeration. It is nice tasting coffee.

When you visit we can make you some. Just give me a little advance notice!