Raising silkworms is a tradition at our son's preschool. There are several mulberry trees there so it makes keeping them really easy.
For us it was a little more difficult because we don't have a nearby mulberry tree that we know of so we had to keep a sharp eye out for them when we needed to harvest leaves in order to keep our caterpillars happy and healthy.
Once they started to spin their cocoons I started to think about harvesting the silk.
Eventually all of our caterpillars turned into moths and we were left with empty cocoons. Like chickens - the moths have lost the ability to fly so you can keep them in a box like we did quite easily. The traditional way to harvest the silk is to boil the cocoons pupae and all before the moths emerge leaving only enough to lay eggs for the next cycle.
The moths are really cute once the emerge from the cocoons. The don't have mouths and only live for about two weeks with nothing to do but procreate. We have far more eggs than we need for next year so we might choose to boil some pupae before they hatch. Some people even eat them but I'd have to be pretty hungry for that to happen. We let all of ours come out before I decided to try to make some thread from the cocoons. Even though I have no experience and did no research, it worked pretty well. I'll write about that in tomorrow's post.
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