SILKWORMS WORK BEST WHEN “DRUNK.”

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18960, 6 January 1930, Page 7

SILKWORMS WORK BEST WHEN “DRUNK.”

eat less when under STIMULUS OF ALCOHOL. A little rice wine, now and then, is relished by the best of silkworms, a Japanese scientist of unquestioned probity has just informed the world, says an overseas paper. What is mere important, the wine makes them fat and vigorous and full of ambition, keeps them contented with their lot in life, and reduces their appetites so that wine-bibing silkworms eat fewer mulberry leaves than silkworms that are total abstainers. And, what is most important of all, to the girl who wears silk stockings or what-not, the fewer mulberry leaves a silkworm eats, the more economically he produces the silk, which is his reason for being, and the cheaper the finished product should be.

The learned Japanese has been experimenting with alcohol and silkworms for ten years, and his findings are regarded as of great importance in his native land and in other silkproducing countries. The rice wine, or sake, Japan’s national drink, is not particularly a "light” wine. The professor says that only an infinitesimal portion must be fed to the silkworms, otherwise they will become quite blotto, so to speak, and arrive at no good end; but by doling out the stuff judiciously he has caused his silkworms to eat 60 per cent fewer mulberry leaves than sober silkwo.rms. Silkworms never have gone in for a varied diet. They will eat mulberry leaves or they will eat nothing at all, but will sicken and die. And the cost of the silk depends largely on the cost of labour and material required by Japanese, Chinese and South European farmers in producing mulberry trees.

Reports from Tokio do not say just how the professor accounts for the loss of appetite after partaking of the sake, and the silk, producers of Japan are not asking any questions along that line. All they want to be assured of is that his findings are correct before

illillllllllllll!li(lllll|[inill!i!l||lllll!lllilililllliliillllllli||||i||||||||!|||||||||||i|||||{||| thej' start making topers out of their silkworms. Incidentally, the most solemn of prohibitionists need not be uneasy in his mind. The Japanese professor merely says that the silkworm eats less under the stimulus of alcohol. Ife does not say what eventually happens to the silkworm, but it may be disclosed that the unfortunate worm dies in short order. The life of the silkworm is brief at best, so it might as well be merry. Silkworms are grown from egg sheets fifteen by twenty-six inches in size, and in the sixteen or seventeen days between hatching and spinning the 225,000 worms from a single sheet will require about a ton and a half of mulberry leaves. In parts of Japan, and in South China, the growing of mulberry trees and the picking of the leaves constitutes the main and, in fact, the only industry. In South China trees are forced to yield seven, eight and nine crops in a, year, and each crop means another generation of silkworms. Whole families move out to mud houses in the mulberry patches during the season. Farmers have to take to boats to get out to pick their leaves, paddling through the narrow canals that separate the fields.