Those precious silk garments in your closet were made by the caterpillar of a fuzzy, white moth — thousands of them. Silkworms spin a cocoon with a single strand of silk up to 10 city blocks long.

The silkmoth Bombyx mori, originally native to China, was domesticated about 5000 years ago. Its larvae, silkworms, enclose themselves in a cocoon when they enter the pupa phase. They spin their ...

Yangshao people, who lived between 5000BCE and 2000BCE along the Yellow River Valley, are thought to have been the first ever to have practised China's most lucrative long-term secret – silkworm ...

I talked about your question with my friend Allan Felsot. He’s an insect scientist at Washington State University. He told me cocoons are mostly silk. But they’re usually made by moths. A butterfly ...

Silk, the queen of fibres, is drawn or reeled from cocoons of the silk moth (Bombyx mori). Humans domesticated it more than 5,000 years ago in China, from the wild moth (Bombyx mandarina). The ...

“They can’t fly,” says the manager of the Brochier Soieries silk shop in the old quarter of Lyons, France. “Their bodies are too fat. Or their wings are too big. Or something. Anyway, they’d never get ...