No silkworm will be left behind
When the silkworms are just babies, they take up a single tray, and cleaning up one tray is quick and easy. But when they start to grow, we need to spread them along several trays, so they have enough room, and suddenly, cleaning up 11 trays isn’t that quick.
Many times I looked at these photos I took in Freixo-de-Espada-à-Cinta, where they used to raise silkworms, just to see how they did it over there. But honestly, the idea of having them laying around on a simple newspaper and simply keep throwing mulberry leaves did not make me happy.
What I would like to had managed is this netting technique. You just place a net with fresh leaves on top of the silkworms, and they move up, towards the fresh food and away from the excrements and old leaves (See pictures above).
The problem is our silkworms are a bit slow, what made me wait too much time for all of them to move up, and there were always a few less energetic that would stay behind. They made me look for them and move them one by one, because, honestly, I was not emotionally ready to leave a single silkworm behind.
I ended up using the most common solution: using the net as a base so that the excrements don’t pile up in contact with silkworms, just like a chicken coop. When it’s cleaning time, we pick up the net where the silkworms are, and change the paper where the dirt is, for a new one. I would also remove the old leaves that piled up, but as the silkworms grow, the leaves get eaten more voraciously and end up on such small crums that it also falls through the net.
So, I used the “chicken coop” technique” because our silkworms were lazy, but also because Carlota thought they did not like being under the net, the poor things. As you can tell, with one of us picking up the lazy silkworms one by one and the other worried about wether they liked or not being under a net, we spent a lot of time on these things.
If I were to do it again, from what I’ve learnt, I would do more or less the same. This system, although not very organized and not very pretty, is similar to these traditional silkworm japanese trays that I saw here a while after, and so our solution isn’t that far from working well for our silkworm operation size.
--
[ 11.05.2015- 19.05.2015 / This post refers to the investigation and activities developed during the Saber Fazer em Serralves program]
