Laccifer lacca, a small insect
about the size and color of an apple seed, swarms on certain
trees in India and Thailand. Like most bugs, it eats during
its larval stage, then settles down and creates a sort of
cocoon in which to mature. In this case, the bugs create
a huge, hard, waterproof, communal protective shell on the
branches of the trees they live on. Soon, the adult males
emerge from the shell and fly away. The females do not fly
-- they attach permanently to the tree and stay there.
Once the males have gone, natives collect the branches and
scrape off the hard crust. This gets crumbled into what we
call "seedlac." Seedlac is filtered to remove any random bits
of bark and bug legs to make shellac. Along with the resin
we use as a coating, shellac contains varying amounts of a
natural dye, which is why shellac comes in different colors.
The dye color varies with the season of the year and the type
and geographical locale of the tree, and ranges from dark black "dreg" shellac
to almost crystal clear "platina." It also contains about 5%
wax, which it is believed is from wax "breathing tubes" the
larva create in the shellac shell. In the course of processing
shellac, we sometimes remove the wax (to make dewaxed shellac)
and also filter out or bleach out some or all of the color
(to make clear or blond shellac from the more common orange
shellac.)
The locals keep a certain percentage of the branches
intact, specifically those with high concentrations of
live female lac bugs. These are tied onto other, uninfected
trees so that the next generation of lac bugs produced
by the female will have something to eat. It also limits
the damage to any one tree, thus making the whole system
endlessly cyclical. In this way, you could say that the
lac bug is "raised commercially," though other than moving
them to new trees, nothing else is needed. Beetles, like
the lac bug, tend to thrive without our help, as anyone
with a cockroach problem will certainly tell you. As
for how many beetles are needed, the answer is "fewer
than there are." To the best of my knowledge, the world
wide demand for shellac has never exceeded the supply,
and my sources tell me it is not in any danger of doing
so now.
Most shellac today is used by the food and drug industries
as coatings for food, fruit, candy, vitamins, and medicine.
One of its more interesting uses is in time release medicine.
Shellac is thoroughly impervious to acid, but breaks down
in alkaline (basic) solutions. Imagine if you coated half
the medicine in a tablet with shellac. Your mouth and stomach
are acidic environments, but your intestines are alkaline.
The uncoated medicine starts dissolving immediately in
your mouth and stomach, but the coated portion only starts
to work after it makes its way down into your intestines,
some time later. Hence, time release medicine.
Chances are good that you have eaten shellac. Many common
candies, such as Whoppers malted milk balls, Raisinettes,
Junior Mints, and lots of Easter candy are coated in shellac
to make it shiny and prevent the candy from sticking together
in the bag. If you are curious whether your favorite candy
is coated, look on the ingredients list, but don't look
for the word shellac. In the candy industry, it is called
confectioner's glaze, food glaze, or confectioner's resin.
In the dim past, shellac was harvested not for the resin
we know, but for the natural dye I spoke of. Because
true red dyes were once very hard to come by, shellac
dye (which is red) was quite valuable -- vastly more
valuable than the resin, which was little more than a
by product. It was so valuable that one large shellac
processor, Angelo Bros., saw fit to build a huge new
processing plant in Calcutta in 1855. That was a masterpiece
of bad timing. One year later, in 1856, a guy named Perkins
developed the first synthetic aniline dyes from coal
tar, which for the first time in history made red dye
cheap enough so that it was no longer practical to extract
from shellac.
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silk,
honey, and beeswax, is made by bugs, not of bugs...
