Lac Culture

G. Lac culture : Lac culture concerns Trachardia (also called Kerria) lacca, a small, colonial insect whose dermal glands, in the female, secrete a resin-like, pink-coloured substance. The insect feeds on the succulent twigs of specific host plants — ber, peepal, palas, kusum and babool are named — and its secretion hardens into lac on contact with air. Lac is a genuinely complex substance, made up of a large amount of resin together with sugar, water, minerals and alkaline substances, and natural lac as it is first collected is always contaminated with plant and insect debris; the pure form of lac, obtained by washing and filtering out this contamination, is called shellac.

The lac insect is native to India, and India alone accounts for about 85% of the entire world's lac production, which makes lac products a genuinely important part of the rural economy for the farmers who cultivate it. Lac is used to make bangles, toys, woodwork finishes, inks and mirror-backing, among other things, and because natural lac deposition depends on the insect finding a suitable host plant, large-scale lac production requires artificial inoculation of host plants with the insect, to ensure a regular, good-quality and sufficient supply. …