Getting a buzz from slo-mo
TECHNOLOGY often passes me by, but then I stumble onto something that has been around for years and my younger colleagues shake their heads in disbelief.
My phone is still a mystery to me in many ways, but I am learning as I go along.
And this week I discovered ‘slow motion’.
I tested it on the dog and got him to do a ‘running like Steve Austin’ thing, bounding majestically along the meadow with his ball.
Again, Steve Austin is something from the far distant past, so I will explain – he was the Six Million Dollar Man who ran so fast that they had to film him in slow motion.
In my garden I have been filming bumblebees in slow motion and it is great.
Sometimes it is difficult to get a bee on your camera as it hops from flower to flower, quite annoyed that it is being filmed, if the increased buzzing is anything to go by.
But if you can just get a 30 second film of them moving between flowers, the slow motion action can be quite wonderful.
The bee will luxuriate feeding and picking up pollen, then its wings begin to move and it slowly rises up and onto the next flower.
You get to see its dangling legs and its long proboscis – its tongue – that stretches out and investigates the flower before it lands.
All this is done at a speed you can appreciate but the bee will be hopping between plants for hours on end.
Despite their size, as the giants of the bumblebee world, buff-tailed bumblebees are great insects to study because they will concentrate on an area of flowers, making them easy to film.
They are named after the buff-coloured tail of their queen, as the worker bees have almost white tails, which makes them easy to mistake for white-tailed bumblebees.
They love all types of flowers but they especially like open daisylike flowers - we have cosmos and ox-eye daisy in our garden - where they can easily reach the nectar with their short tongues.
They actually nest underground, often using old mammals’ nests, in large groups of up to 600 bees – which is pretty amazing.
The buff-tailed bumblebee has a yellow collar near the head and another on the abdomen.
The queen has a buff-coloured tail, while the workers have white tails with a faint buff line separating them from the rest of the abdomen.
Males have buff-tinged tails and also have black hair on their faces.
And the view you actually get of them in slow motion is better than a still picture, because they are moving around, giving you a good look in 3D. Right, it’s back to the garden to see what other programmes or filters I can put on my pictures.
I really do look as though I know what I am doing.
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