If you are keeping silkworms, or are thinking about keeping
silkworms, make sure you never squash them and to never let bugs of any sort into your
box. You can lose loads of them to bugs which kill your little Silkworms. That way we have
lost about 1/4 to 1/3 of our silkworms to little green bugs and not cleaning them enough,
but ants can kill them as can spiders. I suggest you keep about 50 we accidentally got 800
and are now down to 0, they are very hard work and look disgusting. Unless you have
mulberry trees in your garden it can be very hard to get enough leaves, we have 2 in our
back garden, and mulberry trees are very common round here.
They are supposed to start spinning in about a month to 6 weeks. but
they will not all hatch at the same time, so if some of them are slow to spin, don't worry
they just hatched later. Make sure you do not cramp them, none of ours spun as they
were to crowded at first.
Before they spin they should do a wet messy poop which is rather
disgusting, and really needs cleaning up instantly. I did separate mine into two
sections, the ones which were going to hopefully spin soon, and the ones that should need
to wait a while.
If you have an olive tree in you garden the sticks of those are very
good for silkworms to spin on, but if not don't worry. you can use empty egg carton boxes,
cut up toilet rolls, or cut up aluminium foil rolls, of those from cling film, feel free
to try out new things for them to spin on, and if you find any other good ones
please email me because I would be like
to know.
Unfortunately our silkworms never span, and our local silkworm
expert said that they were too crowded at first, but he was suprised that none
of them spun.
For more information and some pictures
of silkworms go to Kayton's Silkworm's page