> Spider silk is very elastic, and it has a tensile strength that is incredibly strong compared to steel or Kevlar. > > French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them. > > Researchers have long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk, which is stronger than steel or Kevlar but far more flexible, stretching up to 40 percent of its normal length without breaking. Unfortunately, spider silk is extremely hard to mass produce: Unlike silk worms, which are easy to raise in captivity, spiders have a habit of chomping off each other's heads when housed together. > > Female golden orb spiders are known for the rich golden color of their silk. The spiders only produce silk during the rainy season. > > Hand-powered machines to extract the silk and weave it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been milked, they were released into back into the wild, where it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk. > > Silk starts out as a liquid protein that's produced by a special gland in the spider's abdomen. Using their spinnerets, spiders apply a physical force to rearrange the protein's molecular structure and turn it into solid silk. > <div></div> > <cite>Hadley Leggett (<a href="https://www.wired.com/2009/09/spider-silk/">link</a>)</cite> > "It should be said that the female halabe allows herself to be relieved of her silken store with exemplary docility and this in spite of the fact that she is distinguished for her ferocity; her usual treatment of the males who pay her court is to eat them and she feasts without compunction on members of her own sex weaker than herself. M Nogue's apparatus consists of a sort of stocks arranged to pin down on their backs a dozen spiders. The spiders accept this imprisonment with resignation and lie perfectly quiet while the silken thread issuing from their bodies is rapidly wound on to a reel by means of a cleverly devised machine worked by hand." > <div></div> ><cite> <a href=http://books.google.com/books?id=iZLNAAAAMAAJ&dq=spider%20silk%20machines&as_brr=1&pg=PA180#v=onepage&q=&f=false>Great Britain Board of Trade Journal</a></cite> Resources: - [Spider Silk Reeling](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLSGBQUA8l0)