One ounce of silkworm eggs contains 40,000 eggs. The resulting worms will eat 3,500 pounds of mulberry leaves and will produce 18 pounds of silk thread. The average silk worm produces about 1,500 – 2,500 feet of silk thread. Depending on the thread count it would take about 120 to 130 cocoons or the equivalent of 180,000 – 325,000 feet of silk thread to produce a single necktie. So that means the average tie will require nearly 50 miles of thread to produce it. It takes about 1,000 cocoons for a silk shirt and 1700 to 2000 cocoons to make one silk dress. But no matter how beautiful your silk dress is or how long your tie is in reality you are still wearing dried up caterpillar spit. Think about it.

 

Sericulturists, or silk-makers, have been practicing their craft for thousands of years and it is said that by weight Silk is stronger than steel and more flexible than nylon. It is so strong that it could stop an arrow and was the first form of warfare armor. Japanese Samurai often wore a Horo which was a silk cloak-type of garment that was around 6 feet long and made from several strips of silk cloth. It was attached to the back of the helmet and at the Samurai waist. As the horse galloped into battle the Horo would catch the wind and fill up air like a kite to form a buffer zone between the Horo and the soldier’s back. The puffed out silk was strong enough that it would cause arrows to simply bounce off the cape. And if the points did penetrate the cloth, they would simply fall into the open space leaving the rider unharmed. Some of the more elaborate horos also extended forward to cover the head of the horse and they were usually adorned with the warrior’s crest.

 

In the mid 1800s a painter named Etienne Leopold Trouvelot from Medford, Massachuetts  enjoyed raising silk moths as much as he liked painting. In fact he liked them so much that he started the first silk mill in the United States. Everything was running smoothly until the 1860s when a disease started playing havoc with the local mulberry trees, so Trouvelot began experimenting with ways to obtain silk from other silk moths and soon set his sights on the gypsy moth. Now big ‘E’ did do his due diligence and research but unfortunately at the time taxonomist was a bit behind and unknowingly thought that B. Mori and the gypsy moth were closely related and they unfortunately grouped them together.  So as far as Trouvelot knew Bombyx mori was listed as Lymantria mori and the next best cross breeder would seem to be Lymantria dispar, better known as the gypsy moth.

He eventually received a shipment of potential silk moth candidates from a colleague in France that included some gypsy moth eggs. Mr. Trouvelot began rearing these gypsy moths in his backyard and eventually some escaped.  Ooppsie! Now because of that mishap the range of the gypsy moth now extends west to Michigan and south to North Carolina causing millions of dollars in damage annually and that is why we all need to deal with PPQ 526’s

 

Etienne escapade eventually bellied up and he went out of business and the mill closed. Oddly enough in 1899 the Duplan Silk Corporation opened in my home town of Hazleton, PA and became the largest silk mill in the world. I can still remember back in the 50’s and 60’ when many city residents still raised B. mori along with other silk moths species as hobbies.

 

When Claudia and I were still raising silk moths in large numbers every year we would have the ‘Running of the Promethea’. In ancient times the silk producers would increase the genetic pool of their livestock by taking females and tying a silken thread around their waist and then tied them to a long stick. The female bearing sticks were spaced along the road to attract males. Now if the wind is right some male can detect a female up to 3 miles away and no one needed Tinder.  It seems that Promethea like to get frisky a bit earlier than other Silkies so about 3:30-4:00 we would invite our neighborhood to our garden and place our females in a flight house and in no time at all our garden would be filled with eager males. Lots-O-Males. The neighborhood  kids and dogs would chase them around while the parents tried not to pee themselves from laughing so hard. It was a major party. Try it it’s fun and you just may shock yourself with what comes out of nowhere.

 

P.S.  Ben Franklin even splurged on a silk kite for his famous electricity experiments