Silkworms!

A while back, I mentionedthat I had acquired some silkworms.  Five for a dollar, to be exact!  There I was, checking out the primary school community garden during their fete and admiring the plants for sale, when I saw them.  So, they went into a strawberry punnet and came home on my bicycle.  Then began weeks of raiding local mulberry trees for stray overhanging leaves (and there were some from my friend’s front yard too).  Since it is mulberry season, I got some food from the whole adventure too, and some berry-stained fingertips. 

Eventually, they began to show signs of wanting to move to the next stage of their life cycles.  I’d sought advice from wormspit, so most of them found themseves moved to a cardboard roll (ahem) at this point:

I was quite fascinated by the way that the colour of the silk changed between the early stages of cocoon-making, when it seemed quite white, to the next day:

Now, we are waiting to see when they emerge and what happens them.  It may be that with a posse of only 5, there will not be opportunities to reproduce.  But we’ll wait and see.