A butterfly is an insect with large multi-colored wings covered with pollen. The world of butterflies is amazing and beautiful. Many of them are like flowers, so bright and colorful they look. They occupy the second line after the beetles in their variety, belong to the group of Lepidoptera. Now there are about 170 000 species. They can be found everywhere, where there is vegetation, but especially there are many in the tropics. On our Earth butterflies appeared 100 million years ago.
They are day and night. Daytime very beautiful, bright, in the afternoon they flit, and at night they rest. At nocturnal species all the way around. Like all insects, they have a head, chest, abdomen, a pair of antennae. There are two pairs of wings and three pairs of legs.
They feed mainly flower nectar with the help of a proboscis, which penetrates deep into the core of the flower. When the butterfly has a break in food, the proboscis folds into a spiral under the head of an insect. But there are also such individuals who have no mouth, they live at the expense of accumulated reserves, when they were caterpillars.
These insects can see and distinguish colors, smell. The smell is caught by the antennae, the taste is perceived thanks to the organs of the mouth. Wings are covered with tiny scales that form a pattern of insects. Flakes themselves consist of hairs and have a different shape. There are optical scales, they are colorless and covered with thin ribs. Light falling on them, is refracted, and the wing glitters and shimmers with metallic color. They can be yellow, blue, red and green. But there are also such scales in other species of butterflies, which contain pigments of color, these are called colored scales.
