Bee on Cactus Flower

[Andrea B.]

(scroll down for a multispectral stack)

 

The flower is on a prickly-pear type cactus (Opuntia sp.) near my house.

 

Nikon D610-conversion + UV-Nikkor 105/4.5

 

Visible: Baader UV-Cut Filter

f/16 for 1/160" @ ISO-400

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This bee was finding life good.

 

Ultraviolet: Baader UV-Pass Filter

f/8 for 1/60" @ ISO-1600

^{Click for 1500 px width.}

Sometimes the UV gods smile upon us and the bee stays relatively still.

I hardly ever crank it up to 1600, but I'm happy I did that for this one.

[Andy Perrin]

Ooh that’s a pretty one! Now you have “UV B” reach!

[Stefano]

I didn't see them initially, but now I can't unsee them. That flower is full of little insects/bugs/whatever. What are those?

[Andrea B.]

Various kinds of beetles/bugs looking for nectar.

 

Cactus flowers attract a diverse crowd of beetles, bugs, flies, bees and wasps. And sometimes moths or butterflies.

 

I was trying to photograph a cactus flower over in an Arizona park a few years ago where the anther filaments appeared to be waving gently in the breeze. Except there weren't any winds blowing. I was all perplexed until I realized there was a whole party of tiny beetles wandering around in the cup of the flower causing the filament motion. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. It was a Beetle Rave I suppose.

[Andrea B.]

I tried to stack three IR photos of the cactus flower to make a time stack, but it didn't work well. Looks too jumbled. Sometimes I get these time stacks to work; sometimes not.

 

Beetle Confetti

[Stefano]

It has its meaning, looks a bit like abstract art, those insects that partly exist and partly not and all you see is a colored shadow. Like they are there, but not really. I like it.

[colinbm]

Looks good Andrea, the crowd make it more interesting.

[Andy Perrin]

The beetle rave look is strong on the chrono-chromo-whatsit image.

[Cadmium]

The cactus flower is cool. :-)

The other beetle bugs look to be all the same kind of bug to me in the first visual shot.

The time shot in pretty cool and interesting. but it doesn't make me think those bugs are various types.

[dabateman]

I like the red, green and blue bugs. That time shot has character.

[ulf]

Nice images and I really like the titles!

[Andrea B.]

Thanks everyone for your comments! They mean a lot to me.

 

I need to look up the difference between beetles and bugs. IIRC it is something about the wings.

[dabateman]

So this is your entry into World Bee day today?

[StephanN]

Beetle Confetti

 

[Andrea B.]

I didn't know it was World Bee Day !!

Cool.

[Andrea B.]

Still playing with this.

R=IR, G=Vis, B=UV

 

[Stefano]

...is this TriColour?

 

Anyway, looks pretty, very colored.

 

I hope we will become a not-so-tiny no-mask world not too far in the future.

[Andrea B.]

...is this TriColour?

 

R=IR, G=Vis, B=UV

This is shorthand for saying that I put the IR photo into the red channel, the Visible photo into the Green channel and the UV photo into the Blue channel. So I guess you could call it a multispectral channel stack. In this particular case it is also a multispectral time stack.

I suppose it could also be considered a TriColour. Even though the 3 filters used were somewhat wideband, they did sample from 3 different areas between 300 - 1000 nm.