Adjust the details to match the level of your audience. You made your own colorful dye out of crushed bugs and water! The cochineal (koh-chin-eel) bug (Dactylopius coccus) is a scale insect that lives ...

and Mexico’s cochineal farms are disappearing. More from Big Business Cochineals are tiny bugs that live on prickly pear cactuses. The acid in their guts makes a red dye used in textiles ...

By the colonial period, cochineal dye had become one of Mexico’s most prized exports, second only to silver. Here, a worker selects the best insects from the harvest, which, once dried ...

The inventor prepares his coloring composition for dyeing rose color thus :—Four ounces of ammoniacal cochineal are dissolved in a quart ot hot water and boiled for ten minutes, after which 88 ...