Sucrose is virtually the only sugar in the phloem sap of the cotton plant . Insects produce trehalulose and melezitose by isomerization and polymerization of sucrose; neither of these sugars occurs in the cotton plant . Therefore, their presence on cotton lint demonstrates honeydew contamination. Stickiness can cause a build-up of residues on the textile machinery, which may result in irregularities or excessive yarn breakage. When cotton is very sticky, it cannot be processed through the card; however, with low to moderate stickiness levels, yarn can generally be produced. For this reason we decided to work with mixes having a very moderate level of stickiness so that residue would build-up slowly on the textile equipment. Performing the spinning test this way is more representative of industrial practice. Indeed, a spinner will not run a very, or even moderately, sticky blend. Rather, the spinner will mix the sticky cotton in such a way that no short-term effect will be noticed. Nevertheless, residues will build up over time and translate into a slow decrease in productivity and quality, forcing the spinner to increase the cleaning schedule. In this article, we present only the results of the study on the composition of residues found on the textile equipment after processing of sticky cotton blends.

The productivity and yarn quality analysis will be presented in a future article. With trehalulose content ranging from 0.003% to 0.188% and melezitose content ranging from 0.025% to 0.227% (Table 1), the 12 commercial bales selected were all contaminated with insect honeydew to some degree.
This was confirmed by the high-speed stickiness detector readings ranging from 1.9 to 69.9 sticky points. The fiber properties of the 12 contaminated bales and of the non-sticky control are presented in Table 2.The range of fiber properties is fairly typical for upland cottons. From the 12 contaminated and the five nonsticky bales, 17 mixes were evaluated. The spinning trials were performed using the protocol outlined in Fig. 1. The high-performance liquid chromatography and high-speed stickiness detector results obtained on the card slivers are presented in Table 3.