This is crazy! Our community trees are fruitless Mulberries. This whole time, like 11 years, we’ve been seeing them everyday. 😂 Now we know what kind of trees they are. Lol.
Shaking my head… so silly.
Thank you, everyone, for your comments, suggestions, and offers to help send the leaves to us. Appreciate you all!!
15 responses to “Update on silkworms: fruitless Mulberry leaves found”
What a fortuitous discovery!
Perfectly expressed, Liz!!
Thanks, Esther!
Yay! Glad you found the trees! If I could have I could have sent you some, as we have only one tree – a fruitless mulberry! What a fun project. Hope it all works out. 🙂
Thank you!! That’s so thoughtful of you
We’re learning in real time how these silkworms will grow and develop. They’re already much bigger than when we first brought them home a few days ago.
Well tell them to eat hardy!
They are already chunking up. Seriously, I don’t know what I’m doing with them, but it’s a learning experience to learn their life cycle…in real time.
Years ago my friend/neighbor Marge and I bought a milkweed plant and it had 10 or 12 Monarch caterpillars on it and there was mosquito netting over top. She saw the set-up at a street fair and bought one and called to ask if I wanted one. So we had to water it thru the mosquito netting which was on to keep them from crawling away. Soon we were out of milkweed leaves, so Marge called the woman who sold her the contraption and asked where we could buy milkweed – she told her a place at the side of the freeway, so Marge drove there and got handfuls of it – gave me some and in days, the caterpillars, which were getting big at this point, ate thru all the milkweed leaves. There was a story in the newspaper about a local woman who raised Monarch butterflies and her whole backyard was full of milkweed plants, so we just donated our caterpillars to her. In the meantime, both of us had bought butterfly nets and were set for a big butterfly release that never happened.
When I snapped a photo with my plant ID app, it chose ‘red mulberry,’ which is just fine. It got the genus right. It looks like your silkworms are happy as can be. They should be, with that banquet spread out for them!
They are eating up a storm! They love these leaves. I assumed all mulberry trees had fruits, so I didn’t imagine our trees were mulberry. It’s the fruitless kind.
Major speciesThe red mulberry (Morus rubra) of eastern North America is the largest of the genus, often reaching a height of 21 metres (70 feet). It has two-lobed, three-lobed, or unlobed leaves and dark purple edible fruits.silkwormDomesticated silkworms (Bombyx species) on mulberry leaves.White mulberry (M. alba), native to Asia but long cultivated in southern Europe, is so called because of the white fruits it bears; its leaves are used as food for silkworms. It is naturalized in eastern North America. Several useful varieties of the white mulberry are the cold-resistant Russian mulberry (M. alba, variety tatarica), introduced into western North America for shelterbelts and local timber use, and fruitless sorts such as the ‘Stribling’ and ‘Mapleleaf’ cultivars. The weeping mulberry (M. alba ‘Pendula’) is frequently used as a lawn tree.Black mulberry (M. nigra), the most common species, is a native of western Asia that spread westward in cultivation at an early period. Up to the 15th century it was extensively grown in Italy for raising silkworms, but it has since been superseded by white mulberry. Now an introduced species in North America, it is mainly cultivated for its large juicy purple-black fruits, which are superior in flavour to those of red mulberry.
And we found out…right in front of our house in the community park. Amazing! This whole time we’ve been looking at it and didn’t know. ack!
Thanks my friend! Iam so happy that you found.
Perfect 👍
Thank goodness! These silkworms eat up a storm. 3 big leaves gone, more like decimated, within 24 hours.