What to do when they arrive

Purchased silkworm eggs usually arrive loose in a vial. working on a large piece of white paper,womens silk pajamas, use the little paintbrush to divide the eggs into eight piles, and put one pile into each of eight vials. Cap the vials. Keep them in a warm place out of direct sunlight until you are ready to introduce them to students.

Eggs from a colleague may be stuck to paper. If this is the case, cut or tear the paper so that each piece has 10–15 eggs, and put the bits of paper into the vials.

A shoe box is all that you need to make a silkworm habitat. Choose a place in the room where the silkworms will be warm but not in direct sunlight. Place the shoe box in an open plastic bag, or drape a sheet of plastic over the box. The idea is to reduce evaporation from the leaves a bit without developing a humid environment.

If the eggs are scattered all over the box, that is OK, but the larvae should be placed on a leaf. New larvae must be rounded up each day and delivered to a fresh mulberry leaf.

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 droppings out. Put the silkworm on 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.

 

Heartbeat. With a full-grown caterpillar,silk pajamas, 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.  For more information on insect circulatory systems, check out

 

 

 

Silk Industry

History
The coveted secret of silkworm cultivation began 5000 years ago in China. Sericulture (the production of raw silk by raising silkworms) spread to Korea and later to Japan and southern Asia. During the eleventh century European traders stole several eggs and seeds of the mulberry tree and began rearing silkworms in Europe. Sericulture was introduced into the Southern United States in colonial times, but the climate was not compatible with cultivation.

Today
Today, silk is cultivated in Japan, China,mens silk pajamas, Spain, France, and Italy, although artificial fibers have replaced the use of silk in much of the textile industry. The silk industry has a commercial value of $200-$500 million annually. One cocoon is made of a single thread about 914 meters long. About 3000 cocoons are needed to make a pound of silk.

To gather silk from cocoons, boil intact cocoons for five minutes in water turning them gently. Remove from the water and using a dissecting needle or similar tool, begin to pick up strands. When you find a single strand that comes off easily, wind the silk onto a pencil. Several of these strands are combined to make a thread.

Prepare for silkworm moths

Once the larvae spin cocoons, they require no further care. The moths will emerge in a couple of weeks and can be handled by students. They do not eat or drink—they mate, lay eggs, and die.

 

Get a large flat box,Fantastic silk scarves, or cut a taller one down to about 10 cm (4"). Line the bottom with paper. As the adults emerge, move them to this new box. The moths will stay in the open box. The females will lay eggs on the paper, making them easy to collect.

The eggs will remain viable for a year with minimal care. Seal them in a labeled zip bag and put them in the refrigerator (not the freezer!) as soon as all the moths have died. If you don't refrigerate the eggs, they will still hatch, but over an extended period of time instead of all at once.

Farm workers painstakingly

Farm workers painstakingly place the 500 plus eggs the prized grayish-white moth lays, upon strips of paper or cloth (not made of silk!),mens silk pajamas, until the following spring, when the incubated eggs hatch, and the tiny, black worms emerge. Once hatched, workers transport the worms to trays brimming with the worm's favorite fodder of finely chopped, white mulberry leaves. After approximately 6 weeks, the satiated worms begin slowly to sway their heads back and forth to signal that show time is at hand.

Once the silkworm completes its cocoon, the farmer snatches his cocoon from him, to prevent the shrunken chrysalis, carefully encased inside, from hatching into a moth in 12 days. The silk farmers ensure that this event does not transpire, and does not kill his moneymaking venture, by exposing the cocoons to heat, thereby executing the chrysalis. Now, the silkworm's labor of love is prepared for the silk production process.

The process begins by bathing the now-empty cocoons in troughs of warm water, which serves to soften the gum binding the silken filaments together. He now proceeds with the arduous task of unraveling several cocoons, and winding the filaments onto a reel that twists 10-12 filaments together into a "single" thread of silk. The end product is a skein of raw silk, which the farmer profits from by selling to the highest bidder.

Cloth and clothing manufacturers, use the trade terminology, in labeling their product, as being either 2 or 3 threaded, depending upon the number of threads woven into the cloth.

China

Silk fabric was first developed in ancient China,[1] with some of the earliest examples found as early as 3,500 BC.[2] Legend gives credit for developing silk to a Chinese empress, Lei Zu (Hsi-Ling-Shih, Lei-Tzu). Silks were originally reserved for the Kings of China for their own use and gifts to others, but spread gradually through Chinese culture and trade both geographically and socially, and then to many regions of Asia. Silk rapidly became a popular luxury fabric in the many areas accessible to Chinese merchants because of its texture and luster. Silk was in great demand, and became a staple of pre-industrial international trade. In July 2007, archeologists discovered intricately woven and dyed silk textiles in a tomb in Jiangxi province, dated to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty roughly 2,500 years ago.[3] Although historians have suspected a long history of a formative textile industry in ancient China, this find of silk textiles employing "complicated techniques" of weaving and dyeing provides direct and concrete evidence for silks dating before the Mawangdui-discovery and other silks dating to the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD).[3]

The first evidence of the silk trade is the finding of silk in the hair of an Egyptian mummy of the 21st dynasty, c.1070 BC.[4] Ultimately the silk trade reached as far as the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa. This trade was so extensive that the major set of trade routes between Europe and Asia has become known as the Silk Road. The highest development was in Japan and China.

The Emperors of China strove to keep knowledge of sericulture secret to maintain the Chinese monopoly. Nonetheless sericulture reached Korea around 200 BC,Fantastic silk scarves, about the first half of the 1st century AD had reached ancient Khotan[5], and by AD 300 the practice had been established in India.[citation needed]

Wuxi was originally

  Wuxi was originally a mining town, which, legend has it, exhausted its tin deposits, hence its name, which in Chinese literally means "tinless". It subsequently became an arts and cultural center, with several famous Chinese authors claiming Wuxi as their home town. Among them, most recently, Qian Zhongshu,Sexy silk dresses, author of Fortress Besieged, a comedy of manners set in China in the 1930s. One of the handicraft specialties of Wuxi is the production of Huishan clay figurines. In modern times Wuxi has also produced a number of cultural figures such as Hua Yanjun (1893-1950) also know as Xiazi Abing, famous for his erhu and pipa music. As for cuisine, Wuxi is famous for its Wuxi-style spareribs, sweetened pork mini buns and oil gluten.

Weaving looms in workshop near machines spinning silk from cocoons of silkworms. From the labor of silkworms weaving cocoons comes the thread for silk fabric. Picture of weaving loom producing Chinese silk. The silkworms produce the silk which is woven into silken fabrics. The moths lay eggs to produce silkworms which weave cocoons, from which silk thread is spun to make silk fabrics.