Entomology A bee!

All last summer there were no bees, and I had to polinate everything by hand.

The closest thing to a bee in the last year Ive seen, was a dead one at my mums house 10 minutes drive away from my house.

No bees.

They are all dying out everywhere on the planet.

Colony collapse disorder I think its called.

But I saw one, alive and kicking in my backyard today.

After chasing it around for half an hour as it frantically tried to escape my shade cloth I finally got a pic of it.

Thanks rapid fire camera maker.

Tis a poor pic, but it does prove a bee still lives.







120 Things in 20 years - Entomology - Yay BEE!

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Aquaponics Self cleaning swirl filter revisited

One of the many people named Anonymous took the time to comment on my self cleaning swirl filter, so I thought Id revisit the topic with some thoughts Ive been having.

For the last few weeks Ive been thinking of getting some more fish.

And Ive also been thinking about developing the self cleaning swirl filter a little more.

My original design was to tap off a small amount of clean water for NFT tubes employing the self cleaning filter to keep the roots from collecting solids and blocking the NFT tubes. In the end I got around that by just taking my water from the sump, where there were no solids, but that required a better pump to get water to the top of the tubes. .


If this were ever to be implemented as a system to remove solids from a system rather than returning them to the grow beds it would need some adjustment.

Its easy to set up a container so that it is right at the point of tripping a siphon, but will never actually get there unless someone suddenly dumps water into it. With this in mind, one option I thought of  when I was playing with this idea, was to use a deer scarer...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishi-odoshi

Set a dripping tap, so it slowly filled a deer scarer. The deer scarer should tip only once or twice a day, and should dump the same amount of water that the self cleaning swirl filter takes from the system each time its triggered.

Im going to build a deer scarer, and see how it works, then see if it really would take care of dosing the self cleaning filter with the correct amount of water to make it do its thing.

You can see my previous work on my self cleaning swirl filter here.

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Photography Maybe bee

I was playing around with my new, home made macro lens, and found this interesting little dead thing to act as a model.

I thinks its maybe a bee.

Or a wasp.

Or an ant.

I think its a bee.

If its a bee, its probably a native Australian bee. Perhaps a Megachile or "Resin bee".

Or a wasp.

Either way, this is what you find if you mentally mark out a square foot of ground on my lawn, and search it as if it were a crime scene.

A very interesting looking little critter.

Its perhaps 5mm long.

The background is a dark woollen glove

Dark subject against a dark background.

Still learning.















120 Things in 20 years wonders how its going to get a bee to wink in a planned portrait when bees dont have eyelids.

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Photography Seeing whats inside a canon auto focus lens

Opening up my old camera in an attempt to fix a stuck lens didnt end well, but it did make me want to open other stuff.

A mouldy $5 canon EF 35-80mm zoom seems like a good candidate.

I actually made it work better than it did when I started.

Thats officially a successful repair.

We dont see many of those around here.

Odd feeling.

It turns out I wasnt being all that original when I used a lens cleaning cloth to make my macro lens hack light tight. It seems canon does something similar with a rubber band.

I attacked the rubber grip of the lens by lifting it up with a small flat head screwdriver, and sliding it up to reveal the three screws that control the zoom function.




Once that was done, the lens started falling apart. All it took was finding where the screws were in the first place. All the places I was told to start by the Internet were all false leads. Im guessing things like lenses are made by the lowest bidder at the time, so these things probably change design all the time.

The only real stumbling block was this very fragile looking plug.

Luckily I had uncounted them when I pulled apart my point and shoot canon digital, and discovered they werent really all that fragile.

I covered it with a folded bit of paper so the pliers wouldnt scratch the circuit off and pulled.




I also tried to avoid touching anything that looked like it might be copper. I have a feeling that touching stuff might lead to corrosion.

Probably just being paranoid, but it wasnt any really effort to avoid it. I should buy some cotton gloves for this kind of thing.

The little plug looks like this when its unplugged.

Robots are probably better at putting stuff like this back together, so I took a lot of photos as I was unbuilding it, so that I might have a chance of putting it back together.

Thats a tip.

Take lots of photos of things as you pull them apart.

One part that was really fragile was this little bit of kit.

Its like a switch that drags its contacts along a curved section of circuit board tracks so that the contacts keep in contact when you rotate the lens to zoom.

Or perhaps they adjust the aperture as you zoom, as Ive noticed the available aperture range changes from one extreme of zoom to the other.


Who knows what its really for, but I bent it convincingly out of shape when I was putting the thing back together.

I managed to fix it, but two of the pins will never be the same again.

This is the rear element. (the bit you can see a lens in on the left)

Its a cluster of ... three I think it was... lenses (two at least, but I think one was made of two), that I think also contains the aperture control.

The aperture control stuff must be in there, because there was nothing else with electronics in the lens.

I think this is me taking apart the lens that was really two lenses.

This things all had mould, but the other side of the one you can see in this pic had the most.

This is what I decided was the aperture bit.

I hope this isnt too technical for the reader.

Is bit even a word in this context...

Anyway, the remarkable thing is, after wiping down all the lenses with a lens cloth, it was actually an improvement.

Thats the before and after shots with this lens.

Most of the milkiness is gone, but there is still a bit of mould on the front bunch of lenses, but I think I might hack them off and convert this thing to a macro lens.



Ive been reading up on lenses, and how to hack bits off lenses that you dont want, and turn them into lenses that you do want.

Anyway, not a bad outcome for a $5, brand name, auto focus, zoom lens.

I cant wait to cut bits off it.




120 things in 20 years - Where you will still find someone who thinks a lens doing its auto focus thing is excitingly like having a robot. You also might find someone interested in photography trying to open a lens to see if there really is a man inside who does the focusing. (theres not by the way)

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Aqaponics Experimental tomato tactics

It turns out you can simply hack the top of a tomato off, stick it into your aquaponics systems media, and it will grow.

So as a bit of an experiment, Ive been waiting until my big old tomato vine develops some flowers, then cutting off around a foot tall of the end growing bit with the flowers.

I jam it into the media and it wilts a bit. But then it comes good, the flowers open, and fruit is set.

It seems to be working, and might allow me to grow better quality tomatoes. I have no idea why, but it might.

It certainly will save some space.

Also it  allow me to grow six enormous tomatoes on a tiny one foot high vine which although it might not serve any purpose, it might look interesting. And lets face it. Looking interesting is what sells all those perfect little tomatoes still on the vine in nice neat rows that we see in super markets.

 My bee visited again today.


120 Things in 20 years is doing all those experements that dont really need doing so nobody else has to.

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Aquaponics Shell grit seed raising bee and gecko visitors

I found a little helper in my shell grit seed raising trial.

This gecko is tiny!












I also found a bee.

Thats two now this year I think.

It left soon after I saw it visit my freshly transplanted wild rocket.

But my bee came back a little while later.

At least I think it was the same bee.

It certainly looked and behaved like the previous bee.

She looks busy.







120 Things in 20 years is now a bee keeper. I keep a bee.

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