Sunday Rest: The River of Death

 The Death's-head hawk moth doesn't wear the cutest jumper:

specimen from the collection of Laurent Schwartz. Image by Didier Descouens

Can you see the skull?

It's a big moth - its wingspan can be up 120mm (nearly five inches). Peculiarly enough, the skull-pattern is designed to be reassuring, if only to bees. What we see as a skull a bee sees as the face of a queen bee. This, the moth's stripy abdomen, and its smell of fat, encourages bees to welcome the moth as it crawls into a hive to steal some honey.

That's as evil as the moth gets, stealing honey, but even so few people welcome the poor beast. In France the moth is said to be a harbinger of plague (and the dust from its wings is said the make you blind). In Hungary the moth foretells death; in Germany its squeak is the voice of the devil himself.

This is all highly unscientific, of course, but even the scientists have fallen for the beast's horrific associations. To scientists it is Acherontia atropos, thereby managing to combine a reference Acheron, the river that borders hell, and Atropos, the Fate who snips the life-thread of people with her scissors.

But all the same...there isn't a moth anywhere that any of us would rather see, is there?

Word Not To Use Today: skull. This word arrived in English in the 1200s from Scandinavia. In Old Norse skalli means bald head or skull.