The New Hotness

Morning KP provides considerable time to watch the goings-on in the back yard, including the wide variety of pollinators (formerly known as “bees”) in the stand of daisies just off the deck:

I wondered if the flower heads tracked the sun or just sort of stood there, so I deployed the trail camera to take one picture every five minutes for a bit over 24 hours. Converting just under 500 images into a movie required this incantation:

ffmpeg -framerate 4 -start_number 75 -i IM_%05d.jpg -s 1920x1080 Daisies.mp4

The result of which now appears on Youtube:

The short answer: daisies don’t really track the sun, but they move more than I expected. The stalks carrying unopened flowers writhe all around, occasionally getting stuck on other stems and suddenly snapping free. I was particularly surprised at the number of bees going about their business just around midnight.

For whatever it’s worth, I had to put the open camera in full sunlight on a table out on the deck to dry out the water left from a recent rainstorm. Whether the water comes from diurnal pumping or a leak through the rim gasket, I cannot say, but it can’t possibly be doing the PCB any good.

I do not expect the video to go viral …