What do silkworms moths eat

They will surround themselves in golden yellow, salmon pink, yellow-green or white cocoons. In a month or so they will exude a chemical that dissolves the end of the cocoon so they can emerge as a flightless moth. Put the moths together in a flat-bottomed box.

They do not eat or drink during this part of the lifecycle. The moths will flap their wings at high speed calling for a mate. When they find a mate they will join at the tail end.

When mating ends, the females will lay eggs. The eggs will be laid on the walls of your box and on any paper available. The grey eggs are fertile and will hatch next spring. The yellow eggs are infertile. The moths will only live for a week or two. The moths do not eat or drink and only need protection from sun and predators such as spiders and birds. When they die they will become still and lifeless, sometimes they lie on their back.

You should remove all dead moths and put them in the garden because dead animals can cause disease amongst the living ones. At this point you need to choose if you wish to keep silk worms again.

Do not compost the eggs, return them to the supplier, give them away to a friend or burn them. It would not be humane to dispose of them in the garden or bin. The eggs will hatch into tiny worms next spring. Why they are good pets:. Silkworms are good pets because they are noiseless, odourless, little and soft.

They live for only a short time. We can enjoy them now and again the next year. It is quite easy to separate the male and female Silk Moths, with the females having the larger abdomen and the males possessing the smaller abdomen.

Download Silkworm Fact Sheet. Back to all Fact Sheets. The information provided is not the only information available. In any medical situations, you should always consult your vet, including questions regarding your pet's diet. We are open for essential shopping.

Silkworms Bombyx Mori Silkworm Introduction and Origin Chinese first domesticated Silkworms around years ago, and for years the Chinese kept the secret of how to use them to produce silk. Silkworm Characteristics Newly hatched silkworms look like thin pencil lines drawn on paper. Silkworm Feeding Silkworms have huge appetites, and their appetite gets bigger as they grow. Silkworm Housing Silkworms prefer a dry, cool, airy place. The moths will then mate, lay between eggs and die.

Checkmark icon Added to your cart:. Cart subtotal. Close icon. 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.