When do silkworms taste the best?
Even though we didn't
get pigs this year, we do have a few hundred new animals on the farm
--- silkworms! I haven't been posting about our inesect
adventures here because I've been pouring out my enthusiasm over on our
chicken blog, specifically:
- The potential of feeding silkworms to chickens
- How to raise silkworms
- How silkworm culture compares to feeding your chickens grains and soybeans
- When to hatch silkworms
- And many more posts coming up in the days ahead now that our silkworms have hatched
But I wanted to hit up
this larger audience for ideas on designing a silkworm experiment this
spring. Silk producers end up with a lot of dead silkworm pupae,
which they feed to chickens, pigs, and people, but it's clear that
silkworms aren't at their nutritional best at the pupal stage.
Since I don't care about silk, I can feed my silkworms to chickens at
any age, but when is the best time?
Before pupating, silkworms go
through five instars (caterpillar stages between molts). During
each instar, the catperillars are larger than they were before, but so
is their silk gland in proportion to their body, and silk isn't
terribly tasty or nutritious. My goal is to find the silkworm age
at which the caterpillars are as large as possible before their
nutritional value declines.
I assume chickens can
tell the difference between a subpar and a top-notch silkworm just like
I can tell the difference between an old, woody kale leaf versus a
tender, young leaf. But how do I analyze taste-test data from a
chicken? I could put out a tray of 30 silkworms each week and see
how long it takes the flock to gulp them down, but that plan has issues
since the silkworms will be bigger each week (presumably meaning they'd
take longer to eat). More importantly, we breed our chickens to
be non-pets in an effort to keep the flock out of the garden, so it
would probably take a while for them to even come up and discover a
dish of silkworms. How would you go about deciphering silkworm
palatability to your flock?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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If you don't have sequential batches ready at the same time, I say freeze a certain amount, like 300g or so at different stages of development. Then you can mix them together on a tray, and feed the chickens. When they have eaten about half, take the tray away. Sort them out and weigh them. It could give you a good idea.
Hi Anna,
Did you ever consider eating your self produced silkworms? There are quite a few delicious dishes (Korean for example) one could prepare using these...
Mark