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 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.