Ground Hog Day

The cycle is complete.
To my surprise I discovered that between 20-30 silkworm eggs  have hatched!
I can only attribute this to the fact that we have suddenly had some warm weather and that the way I have left the eggs I have unintentionally created an incubator.
Luckily, I found the new hatched silkworms very early and have been able to rehouse them and provide them with fresh leaves off our mulberry tree.

The rest of the unhatched eggs have been refrigerated until I can get them to their new owner.

Above is a photograph of  our mulberry tree.

It's not very large.

The chicken wire netting is to prevent possums from climbing into the tree and eating all the berries and to stop them from stripping the tree bare of leaves.

Six hundred and ninety nine silk cocoons.

Day Fifty Four

Silk is a natural protein fibre.

Silk production commenced in China around 2570 BC.

White silk was once most favoured because it can be dyed any colour. 

Coloured silk is becoming accepted as more environmentally friendly because colour is achieved without the use of dye.

China is also credited for the first silk fabric.

In an attempt to keep the production of silk secret by the Chinese, some tall stories were conjured up as to how the textile came about.

It was two thousand years before the secret  of silk production reached Korea in 200 BC.

Mountain Magpie, Sparrows and Bramble, by Huang Zhucai, 10th century, ink and color on silk.

Day Forty Eight

The silkworms continue to spin cocoons.
Only six or seven remain and are yet to spin.
Mulberry leaf feeding is no longer a first priority.
Mr Honey Pie has had four days off work over the Christmas holiday break and therefore not able to top up our supply daily from the usual source.
Thank goodness we are not desperate for leaves!  Today, the remaining silkworms have barely made an impact on two large Mulberry leaves fed to them this morning.  It will be a relief to not to have to worry about where their next supply of leaves is coming from.
Once all the cocoons have been spun I'd like to count the number of cocoons.
Of course I'll be quite short of the three thousand cocoons needed to make half a kilogram of silk!
The next challenge will be housing hundreds of moths and providing them with a place to lay their eggs.  Each female moth will deposit around 400 eggs.  They will only be viable if fertilized.

The silkworms at maturity, are around ten thousand times heavier than when they hatched.

Day Forty Two

Today has been a day of capturing escapees.

And watching other silkworms spin gossamer webs to build their cocoon.

Day Forty One

My biggest fear at the moment is that one of the silkworms is going to get stepped on!
I came home this afternoon to find five or six of the little critters creeping around on the floor, probably having dropped off the edge of their tank in a bid to find a spot to anchor their cocoon!

Spinning is proceeding happily.

The silkworms make just as much noise spinning as they do eating!

Did you know that the length of silk thread produced to make one cocoon exceeds six hundred metres?

Day Twelve

Sericulture is the cultivation of silkworms for silk.
Myths and legends surround the origins of silk.
The story I like most is how almost five thousand years ago, the Chinese Emperor asked his wife to find out what was eating his mulberry trees.
On the trees, the emperor's wife, Hsi-Ling-Shi, found white grubs eating away at the leaves.  She thought that she could destroy the insects by dropping the cocoons into boiling water.
What she found  was that the hot water dissolved enough of the 'glue' holding the cocoon together to reveal a continuous thread that she was eventually able to spin to make thread thick enough to weave cloth.
Hsi-Ling-Shi persuaded her husband, Emperor Huang-Ti to grow a grove of mulberry trees for her so that she could cultivate enough cocoons to weave more silk cloth.
This is how Hsi-Ling-Shi became the very first sericulturalist.
Silk production was to remain a guarded secret by the Chinese for three thousand years.
Today, silkworms cannot survive in the wild and are fully domesticated.
The silkworm moth cannot fly and would fall easily fall prey to predators.

Emperor Huang-Ti (Yellow Emperor)

Source

Day Four

Phew, what a day!
Thought I'd not get around to this post today, even though photos were taken early morning.  Birthday celebrations with family followed by a trip to the emergency room at ANZAC Memorial Hospital Katoomba kept me busy.
Not to worry though, everything's good. Just need to make an appointment to see my dentist is all.

Today's emergents. 

Length: less than 3mm

Thickness: less than 1mm.

Most of the eggs are now pale in colour, that is, empty.

Three little silkworms, reaching for that elusive mulberry leaf.

Silkworms are insects.

The caterpillars have six 'real' legs and five pairs of false legs.

Day Three

One and two day old silkworms continue to  nibble away at the mulberry leaves creating a lacy pattern.

I swear that this morning's new hatchlings are much bigger than the first day's.

Above you can see the white eggs which have hatched and the dark spot is the hole from which the furry silkworms have emerged.

The darker eggs are unhatched fertile eggs.

Unlike the adult silkworm, newborn silkworms are hairy.

In Japan, newborn silkworms are called "Kego", meaning "hairy baby".

This morning I swapped twenty five of the newly emerged silkworms for three mushrooms at our local Crop & Swap.

I'm reckoning that around three hundred eggs have hatched so far.

Day Two

Here is one of the silkworms that hatched yesterday.

You can see that the tiny little critters have eaten a lace pattern into the mulberry leaves.

This is what the unhatched eggs look like.

These are new hatchlings emerging overnight. There was a full moon this morning at 06.17 hours on 11.11.11.

Newborns on day two.

No hatchlings seemed to emerge yesterday afternoon.

Seems that they may prefer to hatch overnight and early morning.

The plan is to lure the hatchlings onto fresh mulberry leaves and then to transfer them to the second tank until all the worms have emerged from the eggs.

Day One.

I'm like an excited mother with a new born babe.

I know the photo's not great but after a two and a bit weeks of waiting for our silk worm eggs to hatch, I was beginning to loose hope.

Then this morning...six little hatchlings arrived.

I should have know that they'd emerge so close to a full moon.  Silly me.

If you look carefully, those fuzzy dark stripes, well, they are silk worms!

My first reaction was to rush out and pick some mulberry leaves for the tiny little darlings.

Next, I isolated them from the main tank, for fear that they may get lost.

In less than five minutes one little one had made its way to the freshly picked leaves.

Hope you can join me on a journey of a different kind!