SILKWORM HELP??????????

Discussion in 'Feeder Forum' started by VIN, Oct 1, 2004.

  1. VIN

    VIN New Member

    Messages:
    36
    I just switched my beardie over to silkworms from cricks....I think he lovesem.....He gobbles them right up...I was wondering, how many should he be eating? he is only 3 months old. And also is this a good staple food? I hate them damn cricks everywhere.....Any info would greatly help me...And once again this site is GREAT........
     
  2. JEFFREH

    JEFFREH Administrator

    Messages:
    5,483
     
  3. wideglide

    wideglide Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    4,350
    I've raised two dragons on silkies for most of their (subadult) lives and everything I hear and read about them says they are more nutritious then crix.

    My understanding is they are a better staple than crix but a little more pricey. I raise my own silkies, though, so I only pay for the chow they eat.

    Feed your beardie as many silkies as he can eat in 15 minutes or so at least twice a day. Chances are that he will be full by the time 15 minutes are up.

    I agree crix are a pain in the butt and smell. Silkies have virtually no odor, don't really move much and there is no risk of impaction since they have no hard exoskeleton.

    Hope this helps!!
     
  4. JEFFREH

    JEFFREH Administrator

    Messages:
    5,483
     
  5. VIN

    VIN New Member

    Messages:
    36
    Now I kinda just leave food in there. And he eats it at will. When I try just the 10 or 15 min thing he dose not eat them...Is that just because I need t do it for a few days so he realizes >>>hey listen I better eat these now or I have to wait again till next time<<<<<< or is he just spoiled?
     
  6. JEFFREH

    JEFFREH Administrator

    Messages:
    5,483
     
  7. wideglide

    wideglide Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    4,350
    Well the only problem I can see with that is when you dust the worms if they are left for a long time the dust tends to fall off of them. I don't know if everyone would suggest this or not but I always feed my beardies their silkies by hand. I take a worm and put the back half of it's body on my index finger and let the front half wiggle around and stick it in front of my beardie's face. It doesn't take long before I've fed them their fill and it's usually before 10 minutes are up.

    I would probably consider only feeding at certain times of the day. It's only going to take a couple of times and like you basically said he'll get the idea. I'd only do this with the live pray however and not veggies. I always have veggies available all day.
     
  8. JEFFREH

    JEFFREH Administrator

    Messages:
    5,483
     
  9. jackiet

    jackiet New Member

    Messages:
    170
    Wide glide--- I have a question-- how have you been breeding your silkworms?

    Is it easy to do?

    (U may have posted this already-- but I have found this part of the site to be overwhelming-- too many post to read in the beardy section)
     
  10. JEFFREH

    JEFFREH Administrator

    Messages:
    5,483
     
  11. kephy

    kephy Moderator

    Messages:
    6,445
    Ditto. I have a hard time keeping silkies alive when they are smaller. I would LOVE to breed them, but I'd be pretty frustrated to spend all that money and be unsuccessful at it.

    Any helpful tips you can share? Maybe start a thread in the feeder forum about how you do it? I imagine a lot of people would love to learn more about it, I know I would.
     
  12. wideglide

    wideglide Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    4,350
    No, I've never posted on here how I breed them. I would consider it pretty easy but it can be overwhelming at times.

    Basically it's like this. I'll start from egg and get back to egg.

    I have an incubator I keep at 84 degrees and about 60-90% humidity. In the incubator will be a small plastic glad container or something similar with a piece of paper with eggs stuck to it that he moth layed. When the eggs hatch which usually takes about a week or two once out of the fridge(I'll get back to that) I take a couple of small strips of chow and place it where there are no eggs but as close to the newly hatched worms as I can get. If I notice a stray worm a long ways away from the chow I'll take a small paintbrush and move the worm to the food. When the worms are that young they tend not to travel very far in search of food and will eventually just die if they never find it.

    I check the worms daily and if some of the food I have put in there is dry I'll add a little more. Within a couple of days most if not all of the eggs have hatched and there's 200-500 tiny silkies in this small glad container. At this point I will take a chunk of the chow and use a cheese grater to grate the chow right on top of the baby worms. When grating I don't use very much pressure so as not to make the chow shreds too heavy. I'll shred enough to cover the entire bottom of the container.

    I'll check the worms every day and after a couple of days if the chow has either dried or covered with too much frass or the silkies seem to have eaten most of it I'll grate some more right on top of the silkies again.

    I'll do this until the silkies outgrow their small containers which might take a week but usually they outgrow it a little quicker than that. I'll have a big sterilite container set up and when it's time to move the silkies from their small container I'll just try to grab the very bottom of the piece of paper the eggs, silkies and silk are on and like a pancake slide it out and into the sterilite. The sterilite has a heat lamp above it and I generally keep the silkies above 70 degrees at this point. The warmer it is the faster they will grow but keep within 68-90 degrees.

    From here I will just continue to grate the chow on top of the silkies. Because they are no longer in a humidity controlled environment I will usually feed them every day not more than they can eat in a day. Anything they don't eat usually dries up by the next day and is waisted.

    When they get to a size where they can move around good I'll stop with the grating and just place chunks of chow in their container. Usually it will take some trial and error to get the right amount to be feeding them. If there's chow left over the next day use less next time and vice-versa. Just make sure they are getting enough food. It's best to feed them every day and at a minimum every other day(I don't like this because I don't think the worms are gotloaded as much or are as nutritious so mine are fed every day.).

    Eventually the worms will become huge. When they get to be about 3 inches I provide food for them constantly. I've found if I don't do this at this point they will cocoon early and the chances of them breaking out of their cocoons lessens. Doing it this way the worms will get bigger than you ever thought they would. About as thick as your index finger and about 4" long.

    When the worms get towards the end of their pupa stage (I think that's what it's called) you will notice some changes in them. This is when they are beginning to get ready to spin their cocoons. They will actually begin to shrink in size and become somewhat yellow and transparent in color. They will also stop eating and you'll see them move their head in a figure 8 fashion. Another thing that will happen is they will give you one big sloppy poo to get rid of any excess fluid or chow left in their system.

    I'll have another container set up with toilet paper rolls I've cut into thirds and halves paperclipped together. Imagine a stack of pipes on a truck and you're looking at the end of the stack. If you look down on my spinning container you will see about the same thing but instead with cut toilet paper rolls. Does that make any sense? Once the worms get into the stage I mentioned above I move them into this spinning container and they will find a nice place to spin a cocoon. This container is usually kept at the same temperature as what I keep the worms at.

    It will take about 3 days for a worm to spin it's cocoon and once it has started it cannot be desturbed or it will start over and begin to spin another cocoon somewhere else. If it doesn't have enough silk left it will simply die in a half spun cocoon.

    After a week to three weeks (I don't know yet what causes this time frame to change) moths will begin to emerge from the cocoons. I take the same containers I mentioned at the beginning of this post and place a piece of paper on the bottom of them. I'll find a female and male moth and place them together in this container and let them do their thing. Telling a female from male moth is fairly simple once you learn to recognize the differences. The female moths are "usually" bigger than the males and will have some organ protruding out of their hind end. Be careful becuase they also tend to squirt some sort of fluid a good 20" from that thing coming out of their behinds. Usually it only happens once so just be careful to have it pointed away from you when you first move it. The males tend to be smaller and will be much more active than the females. Their hind end looks like it has a small flap covering it if you're looking at the moth from above. They will not have any organ protruding that you can see.

    Once these moths do their thing the female will lay anywhere from 200-500 eggs on this piece of paper and they will be stuck to it somehow. After this is done the moths eventually die or get fed to my dragons/skink. If the eggs are fertile they will turn from yellow to a dark maroon almost black. If they are not fertile they will remain yellow. If you have fertile eggs you can put them in a plastic baggie and store them in the fridge for up to 5 years(don't know if that's true yet or not. I've stored for 6 months and been successful).

    Some say you have to at least cool the eggs for a month before placing them in an incubator to hatch. I've seen inconsistencies with this and do not know what causes them. When an egg goes from yellow to almost black is when you're supposed to store them. When you take the eggs out of storage and put them into incubate their color changes from almost black to a grayish color right before they hatch. I've had some eggs never even get stored and go straight from yellow to gray and hatch before I knew what was going on. I've also had some go from yellow to black and if I leave them sit out they never hatch so there is some truth to the cool down but it's not consistent.

    That's where I've ran into problems with way too may hatching silkies before. When I get the eggs that go straght from yellow to gray and hatch way earlier than I had planned. Sometimes I end up with thousands of silkworms for 2 bearded dragons, 5 firebellie toads and one skink!! This happens about 10% of the time but when you've got 200 mating moths laying 200-500 eggs 10% percent can be big number!

    If I were going to just get into raising silkies I'd first just purchase some eggs and set aside about 10 or 15 worms to breed. You may not get any moths that emerge or you may not get any males or females, etc. but you won't be overwhelmed either.

    I've been doing this just for my own animals for just under a year and I've got at a minimum 20,000 eggs sitting in my fridge. Let me know if I can help you out in that area!!

    One thing about the chow is you cannot let it get moldy. When the worms are a little older make sure you let everything in their container fully dry before adding any additional food. This inclused the frass (their poo) they will be dropping. It's really pretty simple. I don't worry about cleaning the container until the worms are at least 2.5 inches long and then I only move the worm to one side of the container and dust bust all the waste then do the other side. I have very, very few silkies die doing it this way. When they become huge this will probably need to be done every few days until they spin. I make sure to use sanitizing gel on my hands before I handle their food.

    There are a lot of holes in this post since I'm typing this on a whim at work but if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them.

    Hope this helps!!!
     
  13. Becstasy

    Becstasy New Member

    Messages:
    129
    Any suggestion on where to order silkworms online?
     
  14. kephy

    kephy Moderator

    Messages:
    6,445
    That was excellent, thanks!
     
  15. wideglide

    wideglide Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    4,350
    Thanks, glad I could help.


    Haven't figured out how to quote two different posts yet. Haven't really looked that hard but anyway.

    I usually get my stuff from www.mulberryfarms.com. I know there's other sites out there that have supplies, though.

    www.silkwormfarm.com I think is the other one I have used and I'll be honest with you about my limited experience with them. Keep in mind I've ordered from them only twice.

    When I recieved my first order I had them include some premade chow. The chow that was included hadn't been cooked hardly at all and had the consistency of oatmeal cereal. That caused it to dry out very, very fast and getting it out of the container was a messy ordeal. I had 3 silkies that arrived dead and 5 more that died soon after. The second order I got from them had a couple of dead silkies and again 3-4 that died soon thereafter. This leads me to believe the silkies arrived with the problem and did not obtain it from me. Could have been the temps during shipping or who knows what else. The customer service I got from them was outstanding, though. I had made an error of when I thought my worms would ship and emailed the breeder and he sounded genuinely concerned about my animals and my satisfaction.

    The thing I do like about them is when I order, usually I'm only ordering a few to tide me over until mine grow big enough. This is a huge plus in my book. I do, however, order the chow from mulberryfarms.com just because of the experience I had with their chow. Chances are it all comes from the same place but the lack of preparation left a bad taste in my mouth so I give mulberryfarm my business with regards to the chow and any other accessories like petri dishes, etc. If I needed a big order of silkies I'd buy from mulberryfarm as well. Oh yeah, I've never received a dead silkworm from Mulberryfarms or have any that have died within a couple of weeks of their arrival. I've probably ordered 600-700 worms from MF.com before I started breeding my own.

    I've heard others say the other places out there are fine so I'm only telling you my experience. I just have never had any problems whatsoever with MF.com and only a couple of minor ones with silkwormfarm.com.
     
  16. kephy

    kephy Moderator

    Messages:
    6,445
    I have been ordering from mulberryfarms for years. Only twice have I had any die offs (that weren't caused by a mistake of my own) and both times they were very quick to replace my order. Occasionally they'd even include something extra to make up for it, like a cup or hornworms. They are pricey, sure, but IMO it's 120% worth it for the quality and customer service.

    Rob, when you buy chow from them do you get it dry or pre-made? I've always gotten the dry stuff and make it on my own because it's cheaper, but then that makes it a little harder to get each batch at the same consistency. What's your opinion on dry or pre-made chow?
     
  17. wideglide

    wideglide Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    4,350
    I always buy the powdered stuff. I also cook it on the stove instead of in the microwave. I've also noticed in the bags of chow there are two distinct ingredients and sometimes they become somewhat seperated. If you look closely you'll see a lighter colored powder compared to the rest of it. Before I dump the powder out I always squeeze the corners and sides and try to get it all mixed up.

    Sometimes I find some inconsistency but not much anymore. I couldn't tell you if it's because of my method or not, though. I have to use the stove because my microwave is too small. When I do use the stove this is what I do.

    I poor the water into the pot.
    I poor the mixed up powder in.
    I mix it up so there's no lumps.
    I turn the heat on high and continue to mix constantly.
    If it looks like it's clumping up too quickly or if I get a strong smell of mulberry I'll turn the heat down just a notch.
    I keep stirring until the mixture goes from fairly runny to lumpy back to even more runny.
    When it is in the real runny stage I'll turn the heat down another notch and keep stirring. I'll do this for about another minute then turn the heat off and I'm done.

    It's a little more work but I think it's quicker and maybe even more consistent due to the constant stirring. From start to finish it takes me a total of 4-5 minutes to make a batch. I'm guessing here but I'll time it next time I need to make some. I've got about 1200 hatchling silkies at the moment and once they start eating a decent amount I'll run out pretty quick. I wouldn't have that many hatchlings but I got about 6 mating pairs that had the wierd, quick hatching eggs.

    I'll add real quick this is exactly what happened last time and I didn't get rid of enough worms soon enough so I had about 50 cocoons hatch and lay eggs. Most of the eggs turned black and are in the fridge but now I've got my hands full again. I've found people around here(where I live) to give them to, though, so it won't be so bad this time. But on the other hand I've just created anywhere from 3,800 to 9,500 eggs from this last batch of worms. I'm sure this can be very profitable if done right. I just do it to feed my herps though and give any extra I have away.
     
  18. kephy

    kephy Moderator

    Messages:
    6,445
    Do you use the exact measurements of water that they recommend?


    About the eggs, if you're looking to get rid of some I would gladly paypal you some money for shipping and whatever you think they're worth. Not right now but in the near future. If you're interested in getting some off your hands, that is.
     
  19. kephy

    kephy Moderator

    Messages:
    6,445
    Oh, and to everyone:

    Does anyone have a problem if I move this thread into the feeder forum? I just really think this would benefit anyone looking for info on breeding silkies, and they won't think to look in the Beardie forum for it.
     
  20. Explodingboy01

    Explodingboy01 New Member

    Messages:
    136
    Awesome Post

    Thanks Wideglide!

    What a great post. I've been wanting to raise silkies myself and was not so sure about all of the requirements. I currently raise crix and they are an incredible pain in the butt! If I miss a cleaning, the ammonia smell in the container is enough to knock you down. Not to mention the crix will begin to die off. I've lost an entire batch this way once.

    I was curious to know, how large are the containers that you put the pairs of moths in to breed?

    By the way, wormman sells silkies, silkie breeding kits, and silkie chow too. LOL!, just had to add that. :D
     
  21. wideglide

    wideglide Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    4,350
    Doesn't bother me any.

    Glad I could help! The container sizes vary depending on what I have around. Right now I'm using containers I have saved up when buying superworms locally. They're round, about 3" in diameter and maybe an inch tall. Glad and Ziplok both make disposable containers about this size as well(a little bigger, though) which is what I use if I don't have any of the others handy.

    If they recommend 3 cups then yes. It's been a while since I've looked at the instructions but I think they indicated 3 cups, which is what I use. At first it doesn't seem like enough when you're making it but give it some time to heat up to a boil and it will become a pretty thin "liquid like" consistency. Basically, it starts out fairly easy to stir then as it heats up it becomes more difficult and actually begins to look like it's clumping up. After a little more time, heat and stirring then it becomes liquidy(if that's even a real word).
     
  22. LizardLicker21

    LizardLicker21 New Member

    Messages:
    63
    Wideglide,
    Could you post pics of your set-up and all the different containers and such? Thank you so much for all of the details!
    Vanessa
     
  23. wideglide

    wideglide Well-Known Member

    Messages:
    4,350
    Well I can't get you pics of the entire process right now because I've just hatched, mated and fed a bunch of moths and I don't reuse the toilet paper rolls, I just usually have enough time to save enough of them to use. I can take some pics of some stuff, though. I'll do that and post them.
     
  24. daniell842

    daniell842 Embryo

    Messages:
    12
    wideglide,
    where did you get your incubator? how much should i really spend on one?
     
  25. LizardLicker21

    LizardLicker21 New Member

    Messages:
    63
    Daniell- I made an incubator out of an ice chest and stuck a heat lamp inside it. I don't know if the light would inhibit the silkies from doing their thing, but it worked for growing some mad e. coli! :)
     

Share This Page