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The cocoons delivered at the filature in 1760, weighed seven thousand nine hundred and eighty-three pounds, and there were spun eight hundred and thirty-nine pounds. Mr. Ottolenghe was now honored with the full appointment of "superintendant of the silk culture in Georgia," with a salary appropriate to his station.
Quickly they broke out now from the cocoons, and the queen bustled from one to the other, assisting, cleaning, encouraging; for it is a tricky job for an insect to come out of its chrysalis-case.
The standard practice, therefore, is to spray the trees soon after the petals fall, with the idea of depositing arsenic in the blossom end. But the season of egg-laying is long, often extending over a period of three or four weeks, for the moths do not all emerge from the cocoons simultaneously.
The Morus multicaulis was imported, and the silk-manufacture with it; suddenly the trees seemed to grow bewildered, they put forth earlier and earlier in the spring, until they got back to January; the leaves at last fell so early that the worms died before spinning cocoons, and the whole enterprise was in a few years abandoned because of this vegetable insanity.
These cocoons, if kept, will produce in due time specimens of the Ichneumon Fly, and these will in their turn go about their murderous work as soon as their proper hunting season comes round again.
Instead the cocoons were spread out beneath the burning rays of the sun and left to bake, being wrapped each night in heavy black cloth that had also absorbed the heat and would retain during the night the high temperature acquired through the day.
A few of the cocoons were kept until the worms had turned into moths, which soon ate their way out of the cocoons when they were placed on sheets of paper and left to lay their eggs, which are taken away and kept in a cool place until the following Spring, when the eggs are hatched and become worms. When the silk had all been separated we took it to Her Majesty for inspection and approval.
In both cases, the laying is taken as complete, for the same reasons as above. We will end with some series that appear to me incomplete, in view of the small number of cells and the absence of any free space above the pile of cocoons: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 M M F M M M M M M M F M F M M M F M F F M M M M M F M F F F F M M M F M These examples are more than sufficient.
At last there came a little warmth and the Emperor moth appeared, yellow and white butterflies came out, flowers bloomed, buds opened ripened by the mystic magnetism of the sun in their sheaths and cocoons great humble-bees came with a full-blown buzz, all before the swallow, the nightingale, and cuckoo. It was but for a day, and then down fell the bitter polar draught again.
These males, so richly supplied, are of handsome but not exaggerated proportions; you can see that the additional food has profited them to some small extent. The cells with abundant provisions, reduced to a half or a third by my intervention, contain cocoons as small as the male cocoons, pale, translucent and limp, whereas the normal cocoons are dark-brown, opaque and firm to the touch.
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