Tiddly Silk Worms

Decided to be a tourist today and visit the local silk museum. It was actually really interesting and I made a new friend which is always nice.

These are baby silk worms and their eggs. At first I thought they were part of the fake display of a Chinese silk harvester but when I looked more closely I saw they were wriggling around.

The museum didn't actually explain that much - I managed to figure out that the silk comes from the cocoons of the worms which they make to transform into moths. So when I got home I researched it all and this is what I discovered:

According to Chinese tradition, in around 3000BC, Hsi-Ling-Shih, the 14 year empress, found a cocoon in the wild and brought it home. She accidentally dropped it into a cup of tea, at which point the silk started to unravel, and so was born the idea of silk-making.

If you want to know more about the process this explains it pretty well: how to make silk.

However, it got me thinking - what happens to the little worms inside the cocoon?

Well, the truth is that they die when the cocoon is put in the boiling water.

But the good news is that there are movements out there for the ethical harvesting of silk, called 'peace silk' where the moth is allowed to naturally make a hole in the silk and escape, before the cocoon is used.

Also, because of intense silk farming for thousands of years, silkworms have apparently become totally dependent on humans and today they only exist on farms or in factories. Though, I can't imagine what an ethical company would do with a moth once it's hatched apart from release it into the wild?

Okay I'll stop here or I'll go on for ages. Think this is the longest post I've ever written on blip - whenever I find something interesting I imagine everybody else will too and tend to go on about it a bit! Have a good weekend y'all.