Birds of Paradise

[pecunium]

In my last post about them I mentioned they were pollinated by birds, and had really viscous nectar (it's almost like sap).

Upright


If I understand it properly, each of the flowers is out because a bird landed on the tip of the bract, to get at the nectar. When that happened the joint flexed and the petals popped up; with the blue portion tapping the bird on the breast. When the bird moves to another flower, the projection is also there to receive the pollen.


Bugs, and Goo


That's the close up of the base of the flower, where the nectar is. The bee wasn't sipping it, she was dipping it up and then working hard to get it into her proboscis. She had to work the goo down to the tip where she could suck it in. Sadly the light wasn't quite bright enough, and the Depth of Field not deep enough so the texture of her eyes was lost.

If you look closely you can see a red spider mite. I think it's caught, as a mammoth in tar.

Comments

[kateyule.livejournal.com]

That's "viscous"--they only look vicious (tho the spider mite might disagree).

I like the incongruity of a spider mite being compared to a mammoth.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

crap... Spell checkers can't fix homophones (because the last post on them wasn't written in an inn either).

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

The top pic is particularly nice because of the contrast between the orange of the flower and the blue of the sky. If you could manage to get tight enough to have only sky, that would make it compositionally stronger.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I've been carrying but one lens. I really wanted to do just that (and chose not to spend the time to clone it out in this one), but it was either the tree, or a lampost. I did crop out most of the tree, but the frills wouldn't let me get rid of all of it.

[soul-diaspora.livejournal.com]

Really shows off the difference in scale between the two insects. Neat!