Joe goodwin, age 13, of Huntsville, Ala., for his question:

What is the miller moth?

In olden times the farmers took their grain to the miller who ground the hard kernels into powdery flour. This was a dusty job and the grain grinder was often a very dusty miller. The miller moth was named for the dusty, white powder on its wings.

The miller is a noctuid member of the noctuidae moth family. These insects are plentiful, and chances are the suicidal moth around the patio lantern is a miller. Their scientific family name is coined from the latin word for night owl because the noctuids have remarkable eyes that glow like golden owl eyes in the dark. A more common name for them is the ow1et moths, and at least 2,500 species make their homes in North America.

Owlet moths of the tropics are big and beautiful. Some have colorful, velvety wings a foot wide. Most of our owlets wear sober shades of mottled browns and grays, and their wingspan is no wider than two inches. When captured, they shed a cloud of dusty powder that reminds people of the dusty miller of olden days.

The winged millers are adult insects. Like all the moths, they go through an egg, a larva and a pupa stage before emerging as winged adults. The adults sip sap and other sweet juices from flowers, fruit and leafy plants. This can be a destructive habit, especially in an orchard. But the damage is nothing compared to that done by the larval caterpillars of the miller moth.

These greedy pests are the cutworms who thrive in loose soil and piles of garden trash. They thrive on the tender shoots of sprouting seeds. If the seeds you planted in your vegetable garden fail to produce shoots, you can suspect cutworms. The greedy little monsters devour our future corps of beets and beans, peas and pumpkins before they have a chance to grow their first leaves.

Sometimes the mi11er caterpillar population builds up and the cutworms are ca11ed army worms. Acres of crops are destroyed and, like the lemmings, the army worms run out of food. However, unlike the lemmings, they do not depart on suicidal journeys to find fresh supplies.

The adult millers rest with their wings outspread. Their colors match their backgrounds of wood and bark and fa11en vegetation, making them almost invisible. They tend to rest by day, hiding in the cracks of tree trunks. Some are slim enough to crawl under the bark, and some of the miller moths hibernate through the winter as adults.