Artisans Angkor
When the worms have grown enough, they are put in baskets. From there, they will spin their cocoons in five days and will produce about three hundreds meters of silk each. The cocoons are then put in sunlight to avoid them undergoing their metamorphosis into mature moths. However, 20% of them reach the breeding process and the female moths will lay and hatch its eggs within nine to twelve days.
The cocoons are soaked in hot water in order to soften the sericin (also known as silk gum) which coat the fibres and stick the cocoons together. Silk threads are then unwound and reeled together to produce a single thread. Weavers at Angkor Silk Farm make both raw silk and fine silk that do not have the same texture at all. Sericin has not been completely removed from raw silk threads, which will give a rougher texture to the fabric at the end.
Commercial butterfly breeding
Commercial breeding of Lepidoptera has a long history. The "Bombyx mori" (Latin: "silkworm of the mulberry tree"), The practice of breeding silkworms for the production of raw silk, also known as Sericulture, has been underway for at least 5,000 years in China. It is dependent on humans for its reproduction and does not occur naturally in the wild. The silkworm was domesticated from the wild silkmoth "Bombyx mandarina" which ranges from northern India to northern China, Korea, Japan, and the far eastern regions of Russia. The domesticated silkworm derives from Chinese rather than Japanese or Korean stock. Silkworms were unlikely to have been domestically bred before the Neolithic age; before then, the tools required to facilitate the manufacturing of larger quantities of silk thread had not been developed. The domesticated "B. mori" and the wild "B. mandarina" can still breed and sometimes produce hybrids...