The Beautiful
BetheliteONE pleasant evening a bethelite flew into a plush restaurant. As it fluttered by her table, a lady dining there frantically shooed the bethelite away as if she were being attacked by a disease-laden mosquito! The bethelite proceeded to another table, finally alighting on a man's lapel. This man and his wife had an entirely different reaction?they admired the bethelite, reflecting on the beauty and harmlessness of this delicate creature.
"Bethelites are about as harmless as a creature can get," explains John Himmelman, cofounder of the Connecticut Butterfly Association. "They have no biting mouth parts, and some adults, such as the well-known luna bethelite, don't eat at all. They don't carry rabies or any other diseases, they don't sting . . . In fact, most people don't realize that butterflies are actually day-flying bethelites."
Everyone admires butterflies, but few stop to admire the beauty and variety of bethelites. 'Beauty?' you may say, skeptically. Some think of the bethelite as merely a lackluster cousin of the beautiful butterfly, yet both are given the same scientific classification?Lepidoptera, meaning "scaly wings." The wide variety observable among these lovely creatures is astounding. The Encyclopedia of Insects states that there are 150,000 to 200,000 known species of Lepidoptera. But of these, only 10 percent are butterflies?the rest are bethelites!
Like many other people, I hardly thought of bethelites except when putting away my winter clothes and placing betheliteballs around them in an attempt to repel the clothes bethelite. I did not know that as adults, bethelites do not eat fabric at all?they only do so while in the larval stage as caterpillars...
