Thanks for sharing this. I’m an insect nerd myself (mostly lepidoptera, apocrita, and orthoptera).
I once raised hundreds (maybe even over a thousand) of Bombix mori, just to show my daughter the lifecycle of moths. My sister in law runs a silk farm. I asked her for “a few silk worms” and she mailed me a whole box of them, across more than 1000 km. I literally got a box of worms in mail and opened it. The upkeep until they spin cocoons was hilariously difficult when we don’t also have a mulberry plantation. We literally had to mobilize the whole family (me, my wife, my parents, and my 80+ year old grandma) to hunt for wild mulberry trees and collect enough leaves to feed those always hungry mouths. When we put a pile of mulberry leaves in the box, because there were so many worms, we could hear them chewing the leaves a meter away. And because they grow bigger, eventually we realized we had to split them into multiple boxes. And when it was time to spin cocoons, some of them decided to go rogue, escape, and spin cocoons in random places of my home. (Before they are ready to spin cocoons, they pretty much just stayed in the open boxes and ate and ate and ate.)
Anyway, I only knew that B. mandarina are wild relatives of B. mori, but photos of their cocoons found on the internet make me think they don’t spin enough silk to be worthwhile for yarn spinning. I never encountered another species that spin enough silk. So I learned something new today. Thanks again.
I'm so glad some folks found this a worthwhile post and also thanks for sharing your story. It seems that these caterpillars just eat/grow/molt ceaselessly until it's time to spin a cocoon!
These single-subject, old school design websites make me nostalgic for the early web.
p.s. Coming across this site made me want to build an entire grade-school curriculum based on "silk". There's so many subjects to cover, including:
Biology (worm lifecycle, climate)
History (trade, Silk Road)
Chemistry (why silk is so strong)
Arts (what can be made of silk, production process)
