Honey Bee Comb Building Time Lapse, 04/10 - 05/10/24

This is a work-in-progress for this year's Comb Building Time Lapse. A small swarm moved in on 04/10 and then absconded less than a week later, but then a large swarm moved right in immediately!
They're building comb, but there are so many bees right now that you can barely see it. Once they get 2-3 more frames built the bees will be more spread out, and we'll be able to see it better. I'll post another update to this in a few weeks.
This year's setup uses the same box as last year, but with an old Nikon D70s instead of an IP security camera. I'm trying to get better image quality and consistency by fixing the focus point, shutter speed, aperture, etc., but I'm still getting weird exposure differences from frame to frame. It might be the LED light bulbs that I'm turning on/off every 10 minutes for the exposure.
I'm processing the stills through ffmpeg, so if anyone knows how to command ffmpeg to do some sort of exposure equalization, please let me know!
There's a companion video to this, where each frames is the blended result of 50 exposures, so the moving bees somewhat disappear:
• CombLapseWithTimeStamp...