What does a tent caterpillar use to make its nest?

Tent caterpillars make their shelters of silken thread. Later, they use the same kind of silk thread to weave the silken cocoons in which they spend the pupa stage of their life cycle. The wormy caterpillars are pretty little striped fellows and their filmy tents are beautiful and very interesting. But the busy tent builders are destructive pests.

Sometimes several hundred tent caterpillars share the same home and, like all caterpillars, they are hungry fellows. A single brood can destroy 10,000 young leaves from a tree. Some of these pests dine only on apple leaves and do great damage to our orchards, others attack forest trees.