Bee mouthparts

coopder · Post by **coopder** » Mon May 17, 2010 2:30 pm

First post!

I found this website a couple of months ago and was amazed at the images posted here. I thought I would have a go myself and got a couple of Nikon objectives and a proxxon milling table. I’ve had a few tries and these are the best images I have got so far:

This is the tongue of the Hairy footed flower bee Anthophora plumipes, a stack of 80 shots using the Nikon N plan 10/0.30 objective.

These are the mouthparts of the cuckoo bee Nomada marshamella, a stack of about 100 shots. I am quite happy with the detail considering my set-up is less than ideal. The images were shot on a very wobbly desk where any slight movement caused the subject to move.

Daniel.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon May 17, 2010 3:31 pm

Daniel, welcome aboard!

I am intrigued by the appearance of the flower bee tongue.

The image has some features that I can't decide whether they're anatomical or artifacts of the stacking.

I'm looking for example at the isolated blob around coordinates x=649,y=332.

What stacking software are you using, and what methods within that software?

--Rik

coopder · Post by **coopder** » Mon May 17, 2010 4:00 pm

Here is a crop of one of the frames. The blob is just a bit of dirt on one of the hairs. I used Zerene stacker for both images, for the tongue I just used PMax, for the cuckoo bee mouthparts I used a combination of PMax and DMap.

You can see in the crop that hairs are not just like spines but they are flattened. I think that in the stack some of the details of the hairs got lost because they are semi-transparent.

This is a crop of the final stack, the artifact at the bottom right is because of a peice of lint higher up in the stack

Daniel.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon May 17, 2010 7:08 pm

Excellent follow-up -- thanks for the info.

I'm a little surprised that PMax gave some of the artifacts that caught my attention in the first image. The crop makes clear what the structure is: a complicated arrangement of overlapping partially transparent blades. I don't have anything like this in my test suite, but...hhmmmm...

Oh, I think I see! You've done a levels adjustment on the full frame, pushing the background to pure white. That causes some of the brightest structures to disappear, while at the same time turning a few broadly OOF features or halos into isolated darker areas. That's what produced the blob at 649,332 that I asked about.

The flower bee tongue is a really cool structure. If you're inclined to shoot it again, I'd be interested to see it against a little darker background. Sometimes the impression of "filmy" comes across stronger if the viewer can see bright highlights off the membranes, as well as other structures through them. I can see a few of those in the crop, but most of them get lost against the brighter background.

Nice stuff -- looking forward to more!

--Rik