What a Silkworm Actually Costs to Keep Alive

Why They Cost More Than Everything Else

Silkworms are consistently among the priciest feeder insects, and keepers reasonably ask why. The answer is not margin. It is that almost every cost-saving measure available with other feeders is impossible with this animal.

One Food, and It Is a Tree

Crickets and roaches eat vegetable scraps and grain. Silkworms eat mulberry and nothing else — either fresh leaf, which is seasonal and carries pesticide risk, or manufactured chow, which has to be produced.

No Cold Storage

This is the expensive one. Most feeder insects can be slowed down: crickets, mealworms and roaches all tolerate cool storage, which lets a supplier hold stock and a keeper stretch a purchase.

Silkworms cannot be refrigerated. Cold is the most common way an entire batch dies. There is no pause button, which means no buffer stock anywhere in the chain.

A Clock That Does Not Stop

A silkworm runs roughly 28 days from hatching to cocoon, through five instars, on a hormonal schedule. It grows from 2 mm to about 7 cm in that window and then stops being a feeder entirely.

So a producer is not storing a product. They are running a production line that must be timed to arrive at the customer mid-cycle.

The Animal Cannot Help

It cannot fly, forage, or survive unattended. Every silkworm alive is alive because someone is feeding it, at the right temperature, on the right food, on time.

What You Are Buying

Set against that: roughly 64% protein, 10% fat, over 80% moisture, and a calcium-to-phosphorus ratio near 1:1 where most feeders need dusting to correct. You are paying for a feeder that cannot be stockpiled, produced by an animal that cannot look after itself, and there is no version of that which is cheap.

Related: why silkworms only eat mulberry · the artificial diet