Silkworm breeding records: how to transform from insect to moth?

Many of you don’t know how silkworms are born. Like most molluscs, silkworms are oviparous. The eggs are tiny, smaller than a sesame seed, and we used to call them silkworm seeds.

The village committee orders the silkworm, and the amount ordered by each family is determined by the number of mulberry leaves they produce.

Before taking the silkworm seed home to hatch, an important task is to clean the silkworm breeding room and, importantly, disinfect it. This is because silkworms are very delicate, and if they are not disinfected, they will have a high incidence of disease.

The seeds were taken back to the silkworm room, and when the temperature was raised to 70 degrees Celsius, the silkworms began to break out of their shells. The newly hatched silkworm is dark and languid and seems to be growing tiny hairs, wriggling piece by piece.

The young silkworms at this stage have to be fed on the youngest leaves at the top of the mulberry branches; they are indeed too delicate, just like a newborn baby. From this day onwards, they must be carefully looked after every day. It takes about forty days before and afterwards, during which time, in addition to feeding, two things are very important: maintaining the temperature and humidity. If you are not careful, the temperature can be too high or too low, affecting the growth of silkworms.

During these forty days, the silkworm sleeps four times – we call them first sleep, second sleep, third sleep, and fourth sleep. Each sleep is a metamorphosis. I have always felt that each sleep corresponds to a human being’s age of eight, sixteen, twenty-four, and thirty-two.

By the time it wakes up from its fourth sleep, the silkworm begins to enter its violent growth phase, which lasts about ten days and is the most powerful stage for eating mulberry leaves; basically, 80 per cent of the leaves are eaten by them at this stage.

These ten days are also the busiest time for silkworm rearing, we had to feed the silkworms with mulberry leaves in the morning before we could have breakfast, and then we had to pick mulberry leaves after having a quick bite to eat.

There is no other way to collect mulberry leaves, but by hand, one mulberry branch at a time, the speed is very slow, a day down, only barely enough to pick the amount of the day, and then rush back home to feed the evening meal of mulberry leaves, tossed down, it is almost 9:00 -10:00 pm.

There are many other tedious things to do when raising silkworms, such as removing the sand, which means removing the silkworm poop. Because the silkworms are kept in a dustpan, the sand has to be cleaned out regularly. Of course, silkworm poop is not dirty at all. The sand can be used as medicine and can also be used as a pillow. You could say that every part of the silkworm is a treasure.

The first seven or eight days are not the busiest, but the ninth and tenth days, when the silkworm undergoes its most fundamental transformation – spitting out silk and making a cocoon.

There is no time to lose; if you don’t put them on the shelf while they are spitting, they may not be able to make cocoons out of the silk. So we work day and night, picking them up by hand, one by one, and putting them on the shelves.

The silkworm spits out its silk to make a cocoon very quickly; in about two days, it spits out all the silk in its body to make a cocoon, and then it curls up inside to become a chrysalis. Another highly significant transformation for the silkworm is the breaking of the cocoon into a butterfly.
Of course, the vast majority of them stop there, as we would pick the cocoons and either sell them to cocoon sellers or keep them for ourselves to make mulberry silk quilts.<a