Interesting facts about wonderful silk

Silk is one of the most valuable and beautiful fabrics. It was highly appreciated a millennium ago, and our contemporaries are fond of it. You know, it is produced from threads extracted from the cocoon of silkworm. The length of one such thread from one cocoon can reach 800-100 meters!
Silkworms are actually caterpillars, not worms. They build cocoons to protect themselves while they change into a moth.
By the way, some spiders also make silk. They weave silk webs to catch insects. However, the silk made by spiders is too thin for making cloth.
To process silk, the cocoons are first put in hot water. This softens the cocoons so the silk can be unwound.
Silk was such an important product during ancient times that the major trade route between East Asia, West Asia, and Europe was called the Silk Roads.

Interesting facts
1. The production of 500 grams of silk requires about 3 thousand cocoons of silkworm. It takes 12 hours of work to make a skein of silk thread weighing 250 grams.
2. Silk thread has tremendous strength, it withstands strong pressure and is very strong at breaking. Not so long ago it was found out that 16 layers of silk withstand a bullet from the Magnum 357 (with a lead core).

3. In products made from natural silk, a dust mite does not live. Sericin, silk glue, is a viscous protein of natural silk. Most of it is washed out by washing silk in hot water. But even some amount of sericin is enough to resist the appearance of a dust mite. Thanks to this, natural silk is absolutely hypoallergenic.
4. 80% of all silk produced in the world belongs to China.
5. For more than three thousand years, China kept the secret of this amazing material, and any attempt to take the silkworm cocoons out of the country was punished by death. According to legend, only in 550 AD two stray monks brought silk to Byzantium. They hid the larvae of the silkworm in their sticks.
6. In India, silk appeared due to cunning Indian king, who made a proposal to the Chinese princess and demanded mulberry seeds and silkworm larva as a dowry. The princess hid the seeds and larvae in her hairdo and took them out of the country.
7. The silk that appeared in the Roman Empire was so precious that it was worth its weight in gold and was often used as a currency in trade, and only very rich people were allowed to wear it.
8. 2,800 to 3,300 cocoons are required to create just one meter of silk fabric, 110, 650 cocoons are required to make a tie, and a silk blanket may require up to 12,000 cocoons of silkworm.
9. One of the most valuable properties of silk is thermoregulation. At the same time, silk products absorb moisture perfectly.
10. The structure of silk is very similar to human skin and perfectly helps the regeneration process. You know, silk soothes dry skin.