SILENCE FOR THE SILKWORM

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 10, Issue 74, 17 January 1947, Page 2

SILENCE FOR THE SILKWORM

Japan is sending out her silk again. It is the lightest thing she has to sell, but the amount weighed 42,000 metric tons a year before the war, for which it helped to pay, A year’s produce was-worth £50,000,000 so that the silkworm’s threads provided the sinews of war. Silk-growing from time immemorial has been in China and Japan a village craft, which now has become in larger and larger groupings a powerful syndicate, a nation-wide Trust. In its culture and methods it remains at bottom what it always was. The silkworm feeds on mulberry leaves and lives to eat and sleep. It feeds for 42 days of its working life, with four days of complete sleep dispersed at regular intervals in between. After the last sleep it has a great and final feed in which it eats twenty times its own weight in mulberry leaves before wrapping itself in the silk sleepingbag of its cocoon. An ounce of eggs, or seeds, will produce 30,000 silkwoi’ms, which will eat a ton of leaves, to produce in return 12 pounds of silk. Needless to say, there are many refinements of the culture which are closely guarded trade secrets. But one which is no secret is the need of complete silence for the silkworm while at its job.