Watching them grow

They are born measuring about 1mm and they grow to be approximately 7,5cm, before starting to show cocooning signs.
When I suggested to raise silkworms in Serralves, for textile purposes, I was thinking about starting with a few - something around 150, not only because we were doing it for the first time, but also because I wasn’t sure about how much food they needed and if the Serralves mulberry trees were enough.
In Bragança they gave us an envelope full of eggs, that we didn’t exactly count, and further ahead we counted 720 silkworms. Something far from the 150 I had planned. But Serralves has three fully grown black mulberry trees, and they were more than enough to feed those 720 silkworms. 

With this experience we came to understand that their cycle, between hatching and cocooning, can develop faster or slower accordingly with the stability of the conditions they live in, and the amount of food available.
This means they will eat the same amount of food while they grow, but this phase will take longer if we feed them less each time, or faster if we feed them well and several times a day. So, we should keep them well fed, because they end up cocooning faster and we end up spending less time taking care of them. And also learned that, when they take too long to reach the cocooning stage, they can become too tired and not have enough strength to cocoon, making a poor cocoon or even dying.
At the beginning, feeding twice a day may be enough, but at the end of the growing stage, when they get really voracious, four times a day would have been the minimum. At this phase we reached a point where we placed fresh leaves in the first tray, and when we got to the fifth or sixth, the food from the first tray was all gone.

In short: keep their trays clean, without any humidity except for the one present in the fresh leaves, warm and stable temperature (they slow down if the temperature drops too much) and feed them abundantly with fresh cut mulberry leaves.

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[ 27.04.2015- 19.05.2015 / This post refers to the investigation and activities developed during the Saber Fazer em Serralves program]