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 ...

cochineal dye, carmine, whatever you wanna call it. Narrator: For thousands of years, people have been using these bugs to dye everything from clothes to pottery. But it wasn't until more recently ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they capitalized on this discovery and monopolized the cochineal trade, exporting the dye to Europe where it became highly valued for its color and longevity.

Ms Butler Greenfield says: "Generally the bugs are dried first... nowadays food-grade cochineal dye is put through many filters to remove insect parts." Last year Peru exported 647 tonnes of ...

You'd never guess by their whitish-grey outsides, but the bodies of these little critters, called cochineal insects ... cheap alternative to synthetic red dye. To make it, workers grind up ...