Day Thirty Five

Today's post is brought to you by the letter S and the number 6.5!

I'm still feeling a bit under the weather today.
My tummy is still sensitive and I'm only eating lightly.

On the other hand, the silkies are spurring on.

The fellows below are measuring in at approximately 6.5cm in length and 1cm in thickness.  Others are are measuring in at almost 8cm.

onthesilkwormroad.blogspot.com

 

Isn't the creamy wonderful?

The cream silkworms are definitely a minority.  Perhaps this is what makes them seem more attractive to me.

I found an interesting article about changing the colour of silkworms which in turn changes the colour of the silk:

Australian Geographic.

Oh the possibilities.

I've listed the silkworms for sale on Gumtree.  The ad will be visible tomorrow.

Unless I take up sericulture  as a full time activity I panic to think what I'm going to do with around six hundred cocoons and the resulting moths and eggs! 

Feel free to contact me through this blog if you would like to purchase some.

The going rate is $5.00 for 15 silkworms.  Pick up only and I'm in the Blue Mountains.

Thanks for visiting!

Day Eighteen

As far as the silkworms are concerned, things are not that different today from how they were yesterday.

A lot of moults have been left behind on the old leaves.  The silkworms are growing.

The rhythm of feeding, transferring from one tank to the other, cleaning thanks and feeding again, is running smoothly.

Weekend visitors have been amazed by the sight of hundreds of silkworms in a feeding frenzy.

My Grand Daughter has enjoyed placing fresh leaves into the tanks and watching the silkworms devouring the them.

The rate at which the mulberry leaves are being consumed has increased noticeably.

Our son M reluctantly took some silkworms home with him in the hope that friends might be interested in having some of their own.

Despite the numbers that have been sold or given away, the quantity does not seem to have been diminished at all.

My Grand Daughter slept over last night.

This morning to continue the theme of sericulture we did some Mulberry leaf paintings.  

It all seems to be about mulberry leaves at the moment.

This picture was painted with mulberry leaves loaded with water colours. 

Same picture edited in PhotoImpressions and then Picasa.

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