I have been trying my hand at raising silkworms for a while now, and each time I run into the same issue. At first, everything will be goimg fine but after a week or so, I start finding some of them dead. Usually they will appear slightly greenish and there will be some fluids leaking out, a couple days later I tend to find a whole bunch of them dead im a similar fashion, some of them also appear flattened. There are several potential causes I can think of.
1. Maybe there are bacteria/fungi on my hands that are transferred to the silkworms via their food
2. I keep my silkworms in a closed container and the air where I live is relatively humid, so perhaps the natural humidity in the air plus water vapour from evaporation caused moisture to build up inside their container
3. Its too hot/cold (since I like to turn on the air con sometimes)
4. I use neem cake on my plants, I dont know if they can absorb the substances responsible for the bug killing properties of neem, especially since most of the oils in neem cake have been removed, but it's not entirely impossible
5. I leave mulberry leaves in their container pretty much up till they are left with nothing but veins or until they grow mouldy, so its possible that the silkworms have ingested some mould
6. I feed them primarily with black mulberry leaves which is not their ideal diet. I have already recently bought some white mulberry grafts and from the few leaves they have I can tell that the consistency is very different, with the white mulberry having much thinner leaves.
If anyone has had experience with this, what have you done to remedy it? Also, what other potential causes could there be for the mass silkworm deaths and what can I do to fix it?
1. Maybe there are bacteria/fungi on my hands that are transferred to the silkworms via their food
2. I keep my silkworms in a closed container and the air where I live is relatively humid, so perhaps the natural humidity in the air plus water vapour from evaporation caused moisture to build up inside their container
3. Its too hot/cold (since I like to turn on the air con sometimes)
4. I use neem cake on my plants, I dont know if they can absorb the substances responsible for the bug killing properties of neem, especially since most of the oils in neem cake have been removed, but it's not entirely impossible
5. I leave mulberry leaves in their container pretty much up till they are left with nothing but veins or until they grow mouldy, so its possible that the silkworms have ingested some mould
6. I feed them primarily with black mulberry leaves which is not their ideal diet. I have already recently bought some white mulberry grafts and from the few leaves they have I can tell that the consistency is very different, with the white mulberry having much thinner leaves.
If anyone has had experience with this, what have you done to remedy it? Also, what other potential causes could there be for the mass silkworm deaths and what can I do to fix it?
