Where to buy silkworms in california

The adult moth has a special spit which is used to dissolve the silk so it can push its way out of the cocoon. Silkworm farmers kill the moths before they emerge and make holes in the silk thread. When they emerge, the wings are crumpled, but they get pumped full of fluid and harden it about an hour.

Moths cannot fly, and neither eat nor drink. They mate, lay eggs, and then die within five days. After the moths emerge from the cocoon, they look for an opposite-sex moth to mate with. Females are significantly larger than males. Females periodically extrude a scent gland through the hole in their abdomen. Males have a flap of skin at the end of their abdomen and flutter their wings a lot.

Each moth will "urinate" a reddish-brown fluid shortly after emerging from the cocoon. It dries to look like blood. Explain to the kids that this is the moth's "pee" that it saved up since it couldn't "go" while it was in the cocoon.

The moths stay mated for about a day. After separation, the female lays eggs and the male looks for another female. Sometimes another male grabs the female before she can lay eggs.

Each female will lay between - eggs! Put paper on the bottom of the container and remove empty cocoons as the moths emerge. The moths will lay eggs on the paper. It is interesting to note that one ounce of silkworm eggs contains 40, eggs 1, eggs per gram.

These worms will eat 3, pounds kilograms of mulberry leaves, and will spin cocoons which will produce 18 pounds 8 kilograms of silk thread. It takes to cocoons to make one silk dress! When first laid, all eggs are lemon-yellow. After three days, they will turn white if they are infertile, or turn black if they are fertile. Fertile eggs might hatch a week or two after being laid in the middle of the summer, but they usually won't hatch unless subjected to "winter" in your refrigerator for at least several weeks.

Wait until the eggs turn black before putting them in the Ziplock bag in the refrigerator. Once you take eggs out of the fridge, they will hatch in days, or maybe not at all. Direct sunlight in the morning for a few hours hastens hatching. Eggs will remain viable in the refrigerator for about five years. If the moths were allowed to emerge from the cocoons, they would make holes in the silk thread. The silkworm farmers kill the pupas inside the cocoons by baking them in a hot oven.

Then they soak the cocoons in boiling water to loosen the threads. A person finds the end of the thread and places it on a winding bobbin. Then a machine unrolls the cocoon, winding the silk from five cocoons together to make one silk thread.

Then the thread is woven into cloth. Silkworm math. Have the kids measure the length of the silkworms and graph them as they grow. Rainfall: When the silkworms are large, take the lid off the container and have the children be extremely quiet. They will be able to hear the sound of the silkworms moving around! It sounds like a gentle rainfall. The sound is not chewing, but their little suction-cup feet lifting off the leaves and plopping back down again. Silkworm pet. Give each kid a silkworm in a cut-down milk carton on their desk.

Have them put in a fresh leaf twice a day, and empty the poop out. Put in a stick and they can see it crawl around. Wait until the caterpillars are two weeks old since there is a high mortality rate for the first few weeks.

With a full-grown caterpillar, you can easily see the heart pumping blood through the translucent skin. The heart is located at the rear end of the caterpillar on the top. You can see it pulse. The main artery carrying the blood is where the backbone would be if it had one. Egg laying. If a female moth happens to be laying eggs, have the children watch. You can actually see the yellow eggs emerge one at a time from her rear end!

She feels around with her ovipositor "egg-layer" in Latin until she feels an empty place to put the egg. Coarse thread. You can make silk thread without killing any of the pupas. When the cocoons are spun, there is a fair amount of loose silk on them.

Have the children gently pull it off the cocoon, making sure not to crush it. They can then roll it between their fingers to make a coarse silk thread. Fine thread. In order to unwind the cocoon, you must kill the pupa inside.

Place the cocoons on a cookie sheet in degree oven for 30 minutes. Then drop the cocoons in boiling water. After five minutes, you can reach in wearing rubber dishwashing gloves , and begin to unwind the cocoon. Unwinding five at a time will make a fine, strong, thread. Silk bookmarks. You can cut out shapes from cardboard and stick it on a bottle. Then place the spinning worm on the top. The worm, not having a corner to spin it's cocoon, will criss cross over the top of the card, and around the edges.

Once the worm became a pupa, take it off the card, take the silk off the card and have a silk woven shape like a heart or cross or star. Of course the worms don't care much for corners on shapes, so there will be rounded corners instead of sharp ones. You can put more than one worm on a shape to make it thicker.

These silk shapes made great bookmarks! The history of the silkworm, which is also the story of silk, goes back to ancient times in China. Some of the stories have been handed down through the generations and are probably based party on fact and partly on legend and myth. The tale which persists is that about 2, B. She unwound one of the threads on a cocoon and found that it was one, very long strand of shiny material. Fascinated, she pulled strands from several cocoons through her ring to form a thicker thread.

Eventually, with the help of her ladies of the court, she spun the threads into a beautiful piece of cloth to make a robe for the emperor, Huang-Ti. This magnificent material, silk, became known at the "cloth of kings". For thousand of years on the royal family of China had silk. The Chinese kept the secret of how silk was made for years.

The material was sold to the rulers of the West, but the source of the shiny thread that made the material was not revealed. The penalty in China for telling that the silk came from the cocoons of the little silkworms was death!

Some very strange ideas were formulated as to the origin of silk. Here are a few: Silk came from the colored petals of flowers in the Chinese desert, silk was made of wondrously soft soil, silk came from a spider-like animal that ate until it burst open and the silk threads were found inside its body, and silk came from the silky fuzz on special leaves. These ideas seem far-fetched today -- but in ancient times they were serious theories. Legend has it that the Japanese carries off four Chinese maidens, who knew the secret of silk, along with mulberry shoots and silk moth eggs.

Today Japan is the leading producer of silk! Another story is that a Chinese princess married an Indian prince. She carries silkworm eggs and mulberry shoots in her elaborate headdress and the secret of raising silkworms in her head. Now silk was grown and produced in India. Finally, two poor monks told Emperor Justinian of Constantinople that they had learned the secret of silk. Justinian send them back to China to get some eggs and mulberry shoots for him. They returned many years later with the eggs and shoots hidden inside their hollowed-out walking sticks.

Since Justinian was the emperor of Constantinople, a crossroads city, the secret soon spread throughout Europe. There are many more interesting stories about the history of silk. Have older children do some research in the library and report to the class. Today silk can be worn by anyone -- not just emperors and noblemen and their families. Silk is made into many lovely fabrics, such as satin, velvet, chiffon, crepe, brocade, taffeta, faille, and shantung. A good class project would be to see how many different kinds of silk cloth could be collected and put them on a chart for the kids to see and feel.

The beautiful colors of silk would also make a nice chart. Modern silkworm moths have been bred to have white silk instead of the amber-colored silk of their wild ancestors.

They also have large, fat bodies and tiny wings, so they cannot fly. This makes it easier for silkworm farmers to raise them and easier for teachers, too!

If you were to release a domesticated silkworm moth into the wild, it would not be able to survive or reproduce. In the wild, silkworms are eaten by ants, spiders, birds and mosquitos.

If you have to spray insecticide near the silkworms, move them away for a few days. You can make a display case showing the kids each stage in the silkworm cycle. Buy a clear plastic box frame 11"x14". It comes filled with a tagboard box. Cut out one of the 11"x14" sides of the tagboard box, making a frame.

Put captions on an 11"x14" piece of paper and glue it onto the inside of the tagboard frame. Now glue dead moths, cocoons, silk thread and silk cloth in the appropriate places.

Cut out leaves from green construction paper and glue them in, too. Make newborn "silkworms" from pieces of black buttonhole thread. Make older "silkworms" of various sizes from Play-dough. Let them dry before gluing them down. Eggs can be Play-dough, beads, sesame seeds, or dots of yellow dimensional fabric paint.

Tape the cardboard frame inside the plastic box and admire your work! Use clear silicone glue for best results it comes in small tubes like toothpaste. Silkworms are insects. All insects have six legs in the adult stage. Silkworm caterpillars have six real legs, plus five pairs of pseudopods false legs on the rear of the body.

The very rear is split and used for grasping twigs and leaves. All insects have no backbone or skeleton, but instead have an exoskeleton exterior shell. Some insects like cockroaches have a hard, crunchy shell.

Silkworms and silkworm moths have a soft skin. Silkworms shed their skins several times while growing. The only warm-blooded animals are mammals and birds. All animals without backbones are cold-blooded, which includes silkworms and all other insects. However, while moving around, all animals' muscles generate heat. If you have a covered container with lots of big silkworms, when you take the lid off, you can feel the heat that was trapped in the container.

The difference between warm-blooded and cold-blooded: A warm-blooded animal always has the interior of its body at the same temperature If their interior temperature gets too high or too low, it will die. A cold-blooded animal's interior temperature varies widely and is usually within a few degrees of the air around it. On a cold winter day, a cold-blooded animal's temperature may be around 40 degrees F, and on a hot day it may soar to 90 degrees F. It doesn't bother the cold-blooded animal a bit.

On warm days, a cold-blooded animal's muscles will be warm, so it can move easily. On a cold day, when its muscles are very cold, it will become lethargic and sluggish. Rattlesnakes in cold areas actually hibernate during the winter since they become too sluggish to move. Bees cannot fly when their muscles are too cold. Bees in cold areas warm up their flight muscles by shivering until they are warm enough to sustain flight.

Scientists are still arguing about whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded. How can you tell if a silkworm is male or female?

I don't know how to tell the caterpillars apart, but the moths are easy once you know what to look for. The smallest caterpillars, which make the smallest cocoons, turn into males. The big caterpillars turn into females. The in-between ones can go either way. Male moths are smaller, and have a flap of skin at the rear.

Females periodically extrude a scent gland out the rear. Look at the pictures in Sylvia Johnson's book for close-up photos to help you tell them apart. It takes more energy to make eggs than to make sperm since the eggs are so much larger.

The larger caterpillars have more energy, so they become females. The small caterpillars, in order to maximize their contribution to the gene pool, become males so they can hopefully impregnate lots of females. What is the Latin scientific name for the silkworm?

Why are some cocoons yellow while others are white? It's genetic. Some people have blue eyes and others have brown eyes. Almost all commercial varieties of silkworms make white silk. W elcome to Mulberry Farms! We have been in the feeder business since , and offer a wide variety of only the finest feeder insects at a reasonable price.

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