As we saw in the last post it sometimes takes the cold, calculating eye of a machine to truly capture the beauty of nature. Such is the case with my current research project at school, where I am looking at the fine-scale social dynamics of our friend the bumble bee. I won't go into the details, but I will show you some pretty pictures that I've generated.

This psychedelic mush is actually the sum of the movement paths of six bumble bees around their colony over a period of twelve hours, where each bee is represented by a different colour. The colony was reared in a plastic box, the floor of which can be seen behind the coloured mass. Jackson Pollock, anyone?

More bumble bee psychedelia. The nectar feeding dish can be seen in the near-top-left portion of this trace. Evidently, these bees weren't very hungry. Probably just colony collapse disorder.

Here's a zoomed-out view of group of individual bumble bee movement traces, which are combined together to make the psychedelic-mush-o-grams pictured previously. Each square shows the movement vector of one bumble bee over a period of one hour (so, five hours for five bees in this case).

That's all the weirdness I have for now. If you are in interested in seeing some more traces like these or actually learning about my research project, please leave a comment!