Bee Vision Bouquet: You Saw It Here First! ...j/k...

[Andrea B.]

Here once more is my (recently often seen) Bouquet which was so vibrant in Visible light.

 

And here is the reflected UV Bouquet in monochrome so as not to be confused by any false colours.

 

 

As a reference, I also extracted the reflected Red, Orange, Yellow and Green from the Bouquet.

(There is no reflected Blue, Magenta or Cyan in this scene.)

 

Red

 

Orange

 

Here is the Green component of the reflected-Orange. Approximately.

 

Yellow

 

Green

 

---

 

Bees have receptors for UV, Blue and Green. I figure that we'll give the Bee the benefit of the doubt and assume that it can see a bit of Yellow or Yellow-Green, too. (Seem to recall that from all my reading last year.)

 

Any flower in this Bouquet which absorbs UV and reflects blue/cyan/green/yellow will appear to the Bee to be blue/cyan/green/yellow and thus easily emulated by - you guessed it - blue/cyan/green/yellow in my Bee Vision Bouquet. For any UV-absorbing, red-reflecting flower, I'll assume the Bee will "see" black/grey tones because no visual receptors are stimulated. For an orange-reflecting flower, I'll assume the Bee can detect the green component so orange flowers will appear greenish or yellow-green to the Bee.

 

But, how to model the UV-reflecting areas on the flowers which also reflect one of the RGB colours or combinations? For example, the orange Lilies in this bouquet are a combination of red-reflection, green-reflection and UV-reflection in some combination. To the Bee, these Lilies are "UVgreen" (maybe a little bit UVgreen/yellow.) UV-Green is a real colour to the Bee, but to us it is an imaginary colour. So I decided to paint any UV-reflecting areas of the Bouquet with a Motley Color Mix such as is never seen on a real flower in order to startle us into recognizing that the Bee sees UV reflecting areas very differently from the way we do.

 

So what do you think?

I had fun.

Bee Vision Bouquet

^{This will click up to a larger size in an expanded browser.}

 

Here is an unresized crop from the sunflower rays and mum rays whose tips and petals are UV-reflecive and yellow-reflective.

 

This is an unresized crop from the orange-reflective and UV-reflective lily petals.

[colinbm]

Amazing Andrea, just amazing......

[Andrea B.]

Thank you. :)

 

What are you up to these days, Col??

[colinbm]

I have finally got the 12ft boat on the water & going properly, so I can now think about UV photography again, looking forwards to a long hot summer down under B)

[Cadmium]

Andrea, Very interesting!

[Andrea B.]

Col, sounds good! I'd love to see some more UV photos from Aus.

 

Steve, I also want to try this emulation using a U-330 or UG-5 photo as a basis. Those two filters, properly IR-blocked, do present a nice bee vision not far off the mark from what I derived here.

 

The basic problem in such emulations is coming up with a color substitute for UVblue or UVyellow. We wouldn't see much UVgreen though (reflect both UV and green).

 

 

To repeat this exercise I need a bouquet which also includes a white, blue, purple and pink flower. The "problem" with florist's bouquets is that so many of the flowers are UV-absorbing. So I need to remember to include some Peruvian lilies which have a bit of patterning in the UV.