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Bee Baby Boom

The colony has been growing very dramatically in the past couple of weeks. All the brood I saw finally saw the light of day and the bees are now quickly filling their hive. All in all it took them a while to really get going. This is one of the disadvantages of top-bar beekeeping, the bees have to build everything by themselves so it takes the colony longer to establish itself. I think it’s a good thing, for one because it’s more natural but also because building comb is one less thing I need to do :).

Given that population growth is now in full swing, I gave them quite a few more top-bars to expand on. We are approaching the maximum size the hive will allow though as I would like to keep a few empty bars to have room for shifting and rotating. It may be time to start thinking about a second hive.

Bee population growth is not exponential, only 1 queen does all the laying although she can lay a few thousand eggs a day. So it’s linear and will probably turn asymptotic with older bees dying. I wonder how big a hive could get outside of its habitat limitations.

Turn on the sound and hear the hive’s rumble.

[flv:http://ben.akrin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1149.MOV1_.flv http://ben.akrin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screen-Shot-2012-07-02-at-11.28.15-AM.png 688 387]

The hive entrance is very busy.

[flv:http://ben.akrin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1151.MOV.flv http://ben.akrin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screen-Shot-2012-07-02-at-11.30.26-AM.png 688 387]

I wish I had a high speed camera.

[flv:http://ben.akrin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/IMG_1150.MOV.flv http://ben.akrin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Screen-Shot-2012-07-02-at-11.32.24-AM.png 688 387]

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A sea of tomatoes

A few pics of all the tomatoes to come. Roughly 100 tomato plants, at 10lbs of tomatoes per plants, this means we’ll be doing some serious canning this year.

More cheapo frames – the tomato super-highway.

Flowers means we’ll be getting some yum-yum soon.

The plants that were planted the earliest of the season were given left-over scraps of wool in order to better retain heat & moisture. They are by far the most sturdy of all tomato plants. Lesson learned.

Look at ’em fancy plants, even I don’t wear such nice fiber.

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The impairing lack of light pollution

When we lived in the city, ambient light pollution was such that I could set my CCTV cams to a certain brightness/contrast and the limited auto adjustments they did were enough to cope with day & night. In the middle of the forest, the night gets full on #000000 dark. The poor cams can’t adjust and I need to pick whether I want to record at night and get white frames during the day, or at daytime and get black frames during the night.

I wrote the following script which computes the average brightness of a cam’s current frame and issues more drastic adjustments if needed. It is obviously tailored for my FI8918Ws but the same idea can be used for others.

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php

$img = @imagecreatefromjpeg( 'http://192.168.1.203:8003/snapshot.cgi?user=<username>&pwd=<password>' ) ;
if( $img===false ) {
    die( "Unable to open image" ) ;
}

$w = imagesx( $img ) ;
$h = imagesy( $img ) ;

$total_r = 0 ;
$total_g = 0 ;
$total_b = 0 ;
for( $i=0 ; $i<$w ; $i++ ) {
    for( $j=0 ; $j<$h ; $j++ ) {
        $rgb = imagecolorat( $img, $i, $j ) ;
        $total_r += ($rgb >> 16) & 0xFF;
        $total_g += ($rgb >> 8) & 0xFF;
        $total_b += $rgb & 0xFF;
    }
}

$average_brightness = round( ( $total_r / ($w*$h) + $total_g / ($w*$h) + $total_b / ($w*$h) ) / 3 ) ;
echo $average_brightness, "n" ;

if( $average_brightness<30 ) {
    echo "night time!n" ;
    echo "moden" ;
    $result = file_get_contents( 'http://192.168.1.203:8003/camera_control.cgi?param=3&value=0&user=<username>&pwd=<password>' ) ;
    sleep( 10 ) ;
    echo "contrastn" ;
    $result = file_get_contents( 'http://192.168.1.203:8003/camera_control.cgi?param=2&value=6&user=<username>&pwd=<password>' ) ;
    sleep( 10 ) ;
    echo "brightnessn" ;
    $result = file_get_contents( 'http://192.168.1.203:8003/camera_control.cgi?param=1&value=240&user=<username>&pwd=<password>' ) ;
} else if( $average_brightness>170 ) {
    echo "day time!n" ;
    echo "moden" ;
    $result = file_get_contents( 'http://192.168.1.203:8003/camera_control.cgi?param=3&value=2&user=<username>&pwd=<password>' ) ;
    sleep( 10 ) ;
    echo "contrastn" ;
    $result = file_get_contents( 'http://192.168.1.203:8003/camera_control.cgi?param=2&value=4&user=<username>&pwd=<password>' ) ;
    sleep( 10 ) ;
    echo "brightnessn" ;
    $result = file_get_contents( 'http://192.168.1.203:8003/camera_control.cgi?param=1&value=64&user=<username>&pwd=password>' ) ;
}

?>[/code]