In the words of the Scarecrow from the wizard of OZ....

Oh Joy! Rapture!

At least that's how I think he put it.

It's a happy day today. Our silkworms eggs are hatching. The kids are super excited! As I write this a swarm of intsy wintsy silk moth hatchlings are leaving behind their pearly egg shells and wriggling their way onto the thread like ribbons of silk worm chow.  That‘s the green stuff around the edges of the paper.  Silk worms only eat mulberry leaves.  Since I have no mulberry tree, my silkies get to eat "chow", reconstituted powdered muberry leaves.  

The grey dots are eggs that should hatch within the next 24 hours. 

The pearly white dots are the empty egg shells.  If you look closely, you might be able to see the hole in the shell where they crawled out.
Each egg is about the size of a steel sewing pins head.  The hatched worms are about 3-4 mm long.

At the moment, our little guys are living in a little creation I like to call the Silk-O-Bator 2000.  It’s an incubator I made using a Styrofoam cooler, household thermostat, 40 watt light bulb, extension cord, duct tape, and a broken CD case for the window. It may not be pretty, but I feel pretty good about it seeing as how the house hasn’t burned down yet. 

 

Here’s the inside. There is a thermometer and a hygrometer in there to make sure the humidity and temperature stay where they should. The humidity drops when lid is opened, but there is a cup, filled with a wet paper towel, under the light bulb, so it should return to normal when the lid closes. The other clear container is for the eggs that have hatched or are close to hatching, and the blue one is for those that are clearly lagging behind.  With luck will hatch tommorrow.