The silkworm Bombyx mori L. ends its larval stage with construction of silken armour called ‘cocoon’. The management of spinning larvae demands much care to maximize profit to the farmer, which necessitates manual picking of the ripened worms and provide proper anchorage to construct cocoons and the process is called as mounting. More than 40 % of the labour force is dedicated towards mounting (15 out of total 35 mandays/100 DFLs) that draws attention of the researchers striving hard to double farmer’s income by designing self mounting cocooning structures. Though corrugated plastic mountages are available, they are suitable only for Bivoltine (BV) silkworms that have a notable crawling habit. Ourefforts to design and develop new ecofriendly self mounting structures for mounting both crossbreeds (CB) and BV silkwormsevolved four new type of mountages viz., Spiral, Zig-zag, Square mountages made of bamboo and the Ribbon mountage. The lab tests of these mountages in comparison with the regular bamboo mountage and the plastic self mounting structures clearly indicated that the spiral mountages are comparable with the regular bamboo mountage with respect to various cocoon and reeling parameters among both CB (PM X CSR2) and BV double Hybrid (FC1 X FC2). Also these are self mounting cocooning frames that reduce the cost on labour during ripe worm management.
Effect of novel insecticides treated mulberry leaves on the reeling performance of silkworm Bombyx mori L were studied. The cocoon filament length was longest in untreated control and in the insecticide treatments viz., dinotefuron 20 SG @ 0.25 g/l, dichlorvos 76 EC @ 2.63 ml/l at different time intervals of 10, 20, 30 Days After Spraying. Lowest filament length was recorded when flonicamid 50WG sprayed @ 0.3 g/l and 20, 30 and 40 DAS. This was followed by azadirachtin 1 % @ 1 ml/l recording shorter filament length at 40 DAS. However, at 10 and 20 DAS azadirachtin 1 % @ 1 ml/l recorded longest cocoon filament which were on par with untreated control. At 10 DAS, filament denier across all the treatments was on par with each other except in the treatments dinotefuron
A field experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of sea plant extract sprayed on mulberry plant at different interval of time and the treated leaves were fed to the silkworm Bombyx mori which were infected with BmNPV. It was found that foliar application of sea plant extract, LBS 13 @ 1.5 ml/l on 45th day after pruning enhanced the leaf yield per plant by 308.81 g, average plant height by 150.42 cm, number of shoots (14.32) and leaves per plant (400 leaves) compared with control. When the treated leaves were fed to the BmNPV infected silkworms, LBS13 @ 1.5 ml/lrecorded highest larval weight (3.33 g/ larvae) with larval duration (7.67 days), least larval mortality (3.33 %) and disease incidence (11.33 %) when compared to control. The study evidenced that application of sea plant extract of Kappaphycus sp. has improved the growth attributes of mulberry, which inturn had a direct positive impact on development of B. mori.
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