Thelymitra “bee”, similar to the Australian T. megcalyptra, is an unclassified NZ blue sun orchid from a colony at Hatfield’s Beach on 31/10/99. Unfortunately it has never appeared since, at this undisturbed site.
Orchids feed from mycorrhizal soil fungi so some species sprout, flower and seed only when conditions suit them. It has also been videoed at Motutangi and Horopito by Allan Ducker so is wide spread, if sporadic. Allan’s 2-D video shows a native Leioproctus bee, as big as the column, kicking the stuffing out of the fluffy white cilia here, hunting no doubt for non-existing granular pollen and nectar. A common weedy Iris thereabouts may have duped the bees into visiting T. “bee's” similar flowers in error. Note the little bug has come to an untimely end on the sticky stigma.
Thelymitra "bee"
Run your mouse over the picture to make it wobble
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Use red/cyan goggles for this ACB anaglyph (Marc Dawson).
This is a good example of how green and blue colours can be fairly accurate, but any red component becomes distorted in an anaglyph. Yellow contains red and green; so it is rendered badly in the anaglyph and turns to green, because only the right eye (cyan filter) is differentiating colour. The red filtered light turns to grey in the left eye and only intermittently shows as red. The red is really because of ghosting, by sneaking through the cyan filter and so hitting the right eye, which is still differentiating colour signals.
Eric Scanlen's opinion is:
"This chicken is unimpressed with analglyph but where there are no reds, it isn’t too bad and if it attracts more viewers to stereoscopy, I suppose it is all to the good. The problem with viewing 3-D on a monitor is that there is no simple method! I dream about dual back projectors with polarised filters and a diffusion screen that won’t violate the polarisation but this may be some time in the future and viewers would still have to wear polarising specs. With pale red~cyan spectacles the yellow “post anther lobe” (on top of the column which defines an orchid) doesn’t look too green but with the deeply coloured ones of
{Marc Dawson’s}, it comes out definitely greenish."
Discussion of anaglyphs, including a different version of this Thalymitra "bee"