Rainy day activities

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Once more into the blogosphere

It's not that I haven't been doing stuff, honest! I have just been remiss in writing posts about my activities.

Recently it has been time lapse stuff. Two books I have recently read (What a plant knows by Daniel Chamovitz and Sting in the tale by Dave Goulson) have inspired ideas.

Growth of plant tendrils round a stick is called thigmotropism, this can be seen in the time lapse sequence I took of one of the cucumber plants in the conservatory. Pictures were taken every two minutes for 8.5 hours from 8am. The curling and movement of the tendrils can be seen.

What can also be seen is the movement of the leaves, apparently this occurs in many species, Darwin made a study of it. So, there are plenty of opportunities to look at what happens with other plants.

I captured another type of leaf movement with the Oxalis plant on the kitchen window sill. A sleepless night and a 4 o'clock foray for a cup of tea and I noticed the plants leaves were all folded up. The camera was set up and left until I had a late and leisurely breakfast. A picture was taken every 5 minutes for 3 hours.

In the garden we have various plants attracting bees. In an attempt to see whether it was possible to identify what types of bumble bee were coming to the garden I set up the camera next to the thistle plant. 

The result has inspired lots of questions:

• how many visits per hour?
• what types of bumblebee?
• does type and number of bee vary with different times of the day?
• are all the flowers on the plant visited equally?
• what about other species of flowers?