Grana cochinilla: the Oaxacan dye insect, its husbandry, and who actually produced it

The scarlet dyestuff of Oaxaca was bred on nopal plots under a husbandry that a Mexican compilation of 1855 describes down to the basket journeys carrying the mother insects nine leagues into the sierra to escape the rains. The same account states that the greater part of the cochineal entering commerce came not from the estates with sixty thousand nopal plants but from the small plots of the Indians.