In June we had an intense time at a special TRC study-day looking at the various basic types of velvet and how to identify them. One of the participants, Monika Gimblett, has a Polish/Dutch background and when we were talking about natural red dyes - cochineal, kermes, lac, madder - she started talking about the name for the month of June in many Central European countries, and the link with cochineal. It's a story that we thought that a lot more people would like to know. Monika sent us the following blog. More information about Polish lac or Polish cochineal can be found in the relevant Wikipedia pages.
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Life cycle of the Polish cochineal, as portrayed in Breyne's 'Historia naturalis Cocci Radicum...', published in 1731.Some stories are hidden deep in language, in words that we use every day but the origins of which have long been forgotten. Such is the case with Polish cochineal, also known as Polish lac or Polish grain, produced by a small insect known in Polish as Czerw.
Here is how it happened: this small bug known as Porphyrophora Polonica or Margarodes Polonicus was once common in central and eastern Europe, from Lusatia along the German border, through present-day Poland to the Baltic countries, Belarus and Ukraine to the northern borders of Romania and Moldova.
The insects (the females in their late larva state) were collected and boiled in water with vinegar, then dried in ovens or in the sun, and ground with some bread acid. The dye prepared this way could be used to dye cotton, flax, silk and wool. To dye 1 kg of silk, 15-20 gr of red powder was needed, but to dye the same amount of wool, 50 gr was used. However, to produce 1 kg of dye it was necessary to collect as much as 155 thousand of insects!
No wonder that Polish cochineal was very expensive, and only monarchs, nobility and high clergy could afford to buy cloth dyed with this substance. To some extent this explains why red was reserved for secular rulers and bishops for many centuries. Colour symbolism is another matter entirely.