Bee removal - video link and explanation.

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Bob cruise director
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Bee removal - video link and explanation.

#1

Post by Bob cruise director »

This is a link to the video I put together on getting the honey bees out of my house followed by an explanation of how I made the video

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q5bpu1zk2mztz ... 1.avi?dl=0

First a definition as I almost had a heart attack when the guys who were coming said that they were going to cut through the roof. To me the roof was the part covered with asphalt shingles but we have what is somewhere between a gambrel roof and a mansard roof. The top part is asphalt shingles and the lower part is cedar shake shingles. Since the lower part is painted the same color as the clapboards on the side of the house, I always considered it part of the side of the house.

After an extensive search for a beekeeper/carpenter to do what they call a "cutout" to remove the bees, I found one that had the skills, equipment and experience to do it. The company is called Charlton Bee Company and is run by Chad and Scott. I had sent them pictures of the problem so we both knew that this was something they were good at. At that point I knew I had to document it. I like to do time lapses as they capture the sequence from start to finish however to do it right on something like this you need a combination of overall views to show what is going on, detailed views to show the work being done and closeups to see the comb. The challenge is that you don't know exactly what they are going to do when, however Scott and Chad were extremely informative about what was going on and where and when some good shots were coming up.

What I did was have two camera bodies, three lenses and two devices which would take a picture every five seconds, one for each camera, plus several batteries and memory cards. What I found when I did this before is that you want to turn off auto focus, image stabilization and auto exposure as they cause the picture to jump around from frame to frame. Also because they wore white bee suits which they had on and off and had dark shirts on, it would make the background go from overexposed to underexposed. Turning off the image stabilization and autofocus also saves on battery life. What you have to keep an eye on is major changes in light if the sun goes in and out.

When they arrived, I set up one camera body with a 15-85 mm lens to provide the scenes of them doing the setup of the ladders and them going up and down the back roof to get to the bees. Next to that was my second camera body with my 70-200mm lens focused on the area where they were doing the work. I needed to get close but not too close so I was about 130mm. These were the pictures for the first three minutes of the video.

At that point, they had started to open the wall to expose the hive, so I changed my 15-85 mm lens to my 400 mm lens and moved to where I could get the closeup shots. I knew nothing about hives but as the pictures show, the bees make several combs each hanging down. Also most of the bees don't fly so they were either making the comb or converting the pollen to honey (no idea how they do that) or other functions that are beyond me.

By the way, honey bees are extremely docile. My wife and I were outside all the time with no issues. Chad and Scott did not have on their bee suits most of the time either.

As Scott was cutting out the combs with a special knife and putting them in a special box (I told you that they guys knew what they were doing), I was taking pictures of the hive when they were not in the way. And I still had my 70-200 lens clicking away every five seconds.

After they had cleaned out the combs, they used a special vacuum (the one with the yellow canister) to suck up as many bees as they could. They estimated that the hive had been there a couple of months and had about 30,000 bees.

I put my 15-85 lens back on the camera body and got the shots of them packing up and the queen bee.

They always try to find the queen as they use that to attract all the other bees to the box for transportation. What I found out is that all beekeepers put a colored dot on the queen with the color indicating the year of the queen. The five colors are standard through the beekeeper community and follow the mnemonic "Will you raise good bees." (white, yellow, red, green, blue) but don't tell Matt or Mike. The blue dot on this queen indicates that she was born in 2018 and she and half the hive she was in left the hive they were in and started the hive in the wall while the other half with the new queen stayed in the old hive.

That was the process of getting 4653 digital images and now I had to process them to condense everything to a six minute show (or less). I have done several of these before and found that you need to have the images up about .15 second and have about .05 second transition from images to image.

I take the images off the memory card using a program called Downloader Pro which renames each image with my name, the date the image was taken, the camera body number and the four digit number of the image that the camera assigns. This process allows me to locate any image very quickly as I store the RAW files by date and makes it impossible for two images to have the same names.

I then import the images into Adobe Lightroom where color calibration and lens correction are made during the import process. In a case like this, Lightroom, if you are not a photographer, is a software program by Adobe (remember them!!) which is a combination of data management software and image correction software having many of the same functions as Adobe Photoshop (which I use to fine tune images for printing or competitions). Lightroom is also great for exporting many images at one time as you can specify the file type, image pixel size and number of bytes. I use this to generate my avatar images as they are such and unusually small pixel and file size. If the software can not comply with your requirements it lets you know which slides have to be redone.

For this, I have a vision of how I want the video to flow so I go through and score the images with stars and colors. The stars for this were easy - 3 stars made the first cut for the video and zero stars did not. I use a more complex scoring system for other projects. The color coding was for the section of the video that I intended to use the images for. This was especially important since I was combining images from multiple cameras.

Once I had groups sorted out, I exported the slides to folders by color in JPEG format. I limited the slide sizes to 700K which I found was much too big as I wound up using about 1300 images in the presentation which produced a file of about 650Meg.

I use a program called Pro Show Gold to create the slideshow. It allows you a lot of flexibility including adjusting the time an image is on the screen, how long and how you transition from one slide to the next, integrating in video if you have it and special effects like the rolling credits at the end. You can also use many transition styles such as the Ken Burns effect where you pan the image to simulate motion. For this video, I wanted to get it out by Thursday so there were not any of the effects. On our trip to Africa in 2014, I was processing about 10,000 images and video from my cameras, my daughter's camera and some that my wife took with her point and shoot camera. It took me about a month after we got back.

The actual video was posted to the web site Friday morning because I had to go back and resize every image to get the file size down to about 60mbytes.

Last thing, was about getting on the roof. The bees which were not vacuumed up were generally foraging bees who came home expecting to have a nice cold drink and some honey (sounds like us getting to the shore) but they found that their home was gone so they just circle around. Ultimately there are accepted into a nearby hive as they provide value to the hive. Today I came to replace the shake shingles so I was up on that roof for about four hours, going in and out through the window next to it. There were about 20 or so bees there and they did not bother me and I did not bother them. As I nailed the shingles and trim, the bees went on their merry way. Tomorrow I will caulk and paint the area.
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#2

Post by SewYoung »

WOW!! Glad you were able to get that taken care of. Looks like they did a great job.
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#3

Post by KayW »

Bob cruise director wrote: Sun Aug 02, 2020 5:58 pm
They always try to find the queen as they use that to attract all the other bees to the box for transportation. What I found out is that all beekeepers put a colored dot on the queen with the color indicating the year of the queen. The five colors are standard through the beekeeper community and follow the mnemonic "Will you raise good bees." (white, yellow, red, green, blue) but don't tell Matt or Mike. The blue dot on this queen indicates that she was born in 2018 and she and half the hive she was in left the hive they were in and started the hive in the wall while the other half with the new queen stayed in the old hive.
So now we'll know who to thank when we get an apian meta ;)

A fascinating write-up - on both the bee removal and on the video process. I'm so glad that it seems to be resolved successfully.

And just to clarify - was the queen was already marked? and that's how they knew she was on the lam from her old hive?
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Bob cruise director
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#4

Post by Bob cruise director »

KayW wrote: Sun Aug 02, 2020 6:47 pm
Bob cruise director wrote: Sun Aug 02, 2020 5:58 pm
They always try to find the queen as they use that to attract all the other bees to the box for transportation. What I found out is that all beekeepers put a colored dot on the queen with the color indicating the year of the queen. The five colors are standard through the beekeeper community and follow the mnemonic "Will you raise good bees." (white, yellow, red, green, blue) but don't tell Matt or Mike. The blue dot on this queen indicates that she was born in 2018 and she and half the hive she was in left the hive they were in and started the hive in the wall while the other half with the new queen stayed in the old hive.
So now we'll know who to thank when we get an apian meta ;)

A fascinating write-up - on both the bee removal and on the video process. I'm so glad that it seems to be resolved successfully.

And just to clarify - was the queen was already marked? and that's how they knew she was on the lam from her old hive?
The queen was already marked. So she and a bunch of her fellow bees, took off from another hive.
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Meg
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#5

Post by Meg »

That was a great video!
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#6

Post by whimsy »

The challenge is that you don't know exactly what they are going to do when, however Scott and Chad were extremely informative about what was going on and where and when some good shots were coming up.
Like when they spotted an especially photogenic bee? :D

Very cool and interesting production!
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#7

Post by Hector »

Awesome. Thank you for the details! BTW, I watched with this as background music, and can recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYAJopwEYv8
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#8

Post by SewYoung »

Hector wrote: Sun Aug 02, 2020 10:44 pm Awesome. Thank you for the details! BTW, I watched with this as background music, and can recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYAJopwEYv8
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6o5NZV83TI&t=29s
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Bob cruise director
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#9

Post by Bob cruise director »

Here is the link to the video by the guys who did the work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1N-MWX ... 6RfSOilzHA
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