Four main stages: silkworm egg, antworm, silkworm pupa, and silkworm moth.
1. Silkworm eggs:
Silkworms reproduce with their eggs. Silkworm eggs look like sesame seeds, about 1 millimeter wide and 0.5 millimeter thick. The outer layer of the silkworm egg is the hard egg shell, and the inner layer contains the yolk and the plasma membrane. The embryo in the fertilized egg absorbs nutrients as it develops and gradually develops into an antworm.
2. Antworms:
When the silkworms hatch out from the eggs, they are brown or black in color, extremely small, with a lot of fine hairs, and look a little bit like ants, so they are called antworms.
3. Pupa:
The silkworm becomes a pupa about four days after forming a cocoon. The pupa is shaped like a spindle, with three body parts: head, thorax and abdomen. When the silkworm has just become a pupa, its body color is light yellow, and the pupa body is tender and soft, and gradually become yellow, tan or brown.
4. Silkworm Moth (Adult):
Silkworm moths are shaped like butterflies, with white scales on their bodies, but due to its small wings, it loses the ability to fly.
Life Habits of Silkworms
Silkworms are metamorphic insects, the most common of which is the Mulberry Silkworm, also known as the Household Silkworm, one of the economic insects that spits out silk and makes cocoons from mulberry leaves as its food. Mulberry silkworms originated in China, its development temperature is 7 ~ 40 ℃, feeding temperature for 20 ~ 30 ℃. Silkworms live on mulberry leaves, and their bodies become white when they keep eating mulberry leaves.
After a period of time, it begins to shed its skin. When it sheds its skin, it is asleep for about a day, not eating and not moving, which is called "hibernation". After shedding its skin once, it becomes a second instar larva. It is shedding a skin counted as an increase of one year, the larvae *** to shed their skin four times, become five larvae, and then eat mulberry leaves for eight days to become mature silkworms, began to spit silk cocoons.