De-gumming Recipe
This recipe is for 100 cocoons, if you have less, halve the recipe and only use enough solution to ensure your cocoons are floating and covered
1/2 cup of biodegradable liquid soap (Dr Bronners liquid soap is fantastic AND organic)
1/4 cup bicarbonate soda
1.5 litres of pure clear water
Method
combine soap, bicarb and water well, place in a large stainless steel pot and heat gently till solution is steaming/gently simmering but not boiling, maintain this temperature, do not allow solution to boil as it will tangle your silk
add cocoons (trimmed and with contents removed) use a clean wooden spoon to help immerse them in the solution but DO NOT STIR as your silk will become a lump of tangled fibres!
simmer for approx 30-45minutes
when the cocoons have de-gummed successfully they will fluff out in the solution, if you remove one and rinse it under running water, it should come up white with no trace of yellow sericin
carefully pour off the solution and rinse with pure water, it takes a lot of rinsing until there is no trace of soap left in the silk,
when the silk is fully rinsed leave it floating in a few inches of water and add a few capfulls of organic vinegar, leave this to sit for half an hour
rinse again and squeeze gently to remove water, hang in an shady airy place to dry, this can take up to 24 hours
for spinning, pull out and fluff up a cocoon and draft to desired thickness, then spin!
Cocoon Cleaning Instructions
Using a clean sharp pair of nail scissors take a cocoon and trim around the emergence hole at the end, neatly snipping off the rim of silk in a circular motion, only cut off the few millimetres damaged by the moths saliva. Next use the tip of the scissors to scoop out the worm and pupa skins and lastly shake out any flakes. Repeat for all cocoons before degumming.
Silkworm Eggs Information Guide
Peaceful Silkworm eggs are currently refrigerated and will begin to hatch within 10 days of receiving them in the mail.
Please do not place purchased eggs back into the fridge as they will have began to develop and will die.
Un-refrigerated silkworm eggs naturally hatch out in early October in Australia depending on the region in which you live, and depending when the weather warms up in your area and stimulates the eggs to develop.
Please ensure you have adequate mulberry leaves to feed your silkworms – the first instar worms (just hatched before their first moult) need fresh young tips or shoots.
If you hatch silkworms out out of season you need to ensure you have access to the growing tips of the mulberry tree as newly hatched silkworms need very tender leaves, full size mulberry leaves are too tough for young silkworms – new shoots continue to grow through the season, so pick leaves close to the growing tips of the branches and chop fine.
Silkworm ‘food’ is also available on the market/internet and can be used to feed silkworms at any time of year.
Happy Silkworm Farming!
Silkworm Lifecycle
Silkworms hatch naturally in Australia from Early October depending on the region you live in, they amazingly coincide their hatching with the first emergence of leaves on the local mulberry trees!
They do not all emerge at the same time but a batch of eggs can continuously hatch over a 6 week period which is why many people refrigerate their eggs for the last few months to give them a even temperature which seems to help them hatch within the same two week period.
The first hatchlings are dark and furry looking! this is the first ‘INSTAR’, there is 5 INSTARS separated by four MOULTS of their skin.
The silkworms happily stay in a box or cage and eat the leaves fed to them, they do not escape but will crawl a small distance if they can not find any food.
After the last MOULT and the last period of growth in which the silkworm devours huge amounts of mulberry leaves it begins to spin a cocoon around itself. This can take 24 hours for it to complete and is one continuous strand up to 900 metres long!
They also do unusual things like spin a cocoon with a friend, or get confused and spin a flat mat underneath themselves, but most of the worms will create for themselves a perfect cocoon with one continuous strand of silk.
Inside the cocoon the silkworm MOULTS for the last time when it becomes a PUPA.
This is the stage in the silkworm industry that the cocoons are baked or boiled to kill the pupa, then each cocoon is ‘REELED’. This is when one continuous strand of silk is unwound from each cocoon, either by hand or by a machine then 6-8 of these strands are twisted together to create one thread of silk. Often the cooked PUPAS are eaten.
AT PEACEFUL SILKWORMS EVERY MOTH IS ALLOWED TO HATCH FROM ITS COCOON!
It stays in the cocoon for about two weeks then hatches inside the cocoon from its pupa skin, the moth then secretes a PROTEIN SALIVA that ‘melts’ open the SERICIN of the cocoon so it can push itself out.
Once out the moth dries its wings and finds a mate, the females are larger than the males as their abdomens are full of unfertilised eggs.
Soon after mating the female lays her eggs between 200 – 500 of them. As the moths do not eat or drink they die naturally soon after laying their eggs, the males may mate with more than one female and then die.
The eggs remain in a state called DIAPAUSE until they have been through a period of cold (winter). When the temperature rises they begin to hatch ready to eat the first tender shoots of the Mulberry tree in spring.
All BOMBYX MORI Silkworms are DOMESTICATED and cannot survive on their own in the wild. They do not hang on strongly and will blow out of trees. As they cannot travel far they will starve to death on the ground or be eaten, so please do not set your ’silkworms’ free. The moths also cannot fly or eat and both worms and moths lack fear of predators.
Some species of silkworms harvested for their silk are still wild.
