Eggs have started to hatch today. Tiny caterpillars are emerging and looking for food straight away. Need their Mulberry leaves cut up and very gently moved onto fresh food with the aid of a paint brush.
*UPDATE*
Day two of the great hatch and they are all out except for one poor little fellow who will not be joining us.
*UPDATE*
Day twelve of the plan to monopolise the silk market. Think the amount of cut up Mulberry leaves needed was greatly underestimated by the company directors. My concern is will I actually have a tree left?
*UPDATE*
Beautiful fat babies rather like those Shar-Pei Dogs with all that extra skin. True eating machines and not moving anywhere, they sit up and almost beg for more food. I am having to take them to work with me now to guarantee fresh food all day. Need to discuss my wages....
*UPDATE*
The spinning has started only 32 days from hatching! Just look at the colour!! The boys plans are reinvigorated and the shares and stocks markets are examined. To spin their amazing cocoons the caterpillars produce a liquid silk from two glands in their head. Moving its head in a figure of eight pattern it spins from its mouth as the silk is actually its own saliva. The liquid silk then solidifies in the air and within three days the cocoon is finished. It is made from one single strand that can be nearly a mile long. The cocoon protects the pupae inside and inside the pupae the caterpillar is under going metamorphosis. Commercial silk farms boil the live pupae inside the cocoons to soften the silk threads and allow them to be unwound back into one long single thread. This obviously kills the pupae.
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