Have you ever heard of cochineal? And I am not referring to the upscale restaurant in Marfa, Texas, but to the small, scale insect native to our area. This insect lives on nopal, prickly pear, Opuntia ...

Tuna found in the desert? OK, fair enough: that’s tuna, as in the Spanish for prickly pear, the fruit of the nopal. Ken Factor and I have spotted an ancient cactus tree growing close to the veranda ...

The cochineal is a tiny insect deeply rooted in the history of Oaxaca, Mexico. Female cochineals spend most of their lives with their heads buried in juicy cactus pads, eating and growing. After ...

Hernán Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, is best known for leading the expedition that brought about the downfall of the Aztec Empire in 1521. While his military prowess is often the focus of his ...

Bug enthusiasts will be seeing red at this year’s Arizona Insect Festival, with a new exhibit dedicated to a prickly-pear-loving parasite used to make scarlet dye once prized by everyone from the ...

Three reds : cochineal, hematite, and cinnabar in the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican world / Claudia Brittenham -- Red at court : did the Maya at Bonampak know cochineal? / Mary Miller -- The politics of ...

Amor Nouira, a farmer in Tunisia's Chebika village, has lost hope of saving his prickly pear cacti, ravaged by the cochineal insect spreading across North Africa. The 50-year-old has seen his ...

An average trip to the grocery store can yield a cartful of colorful foods. Bright among the rainbow are the reds, lending hues to products such as raspberry jam, canned cherries, strawberry licorice, ...

In Chebika, as in other rural areas in central Tunisia, many farmers' fields of prickly pear have been spoiled by the cochineal, which swept through North Africa 10 ...

In Chebika, as in other rural areas in central Tunisia, many farmers' fields of prickly pear have been spoiled by the cochineal, which swept through North Africa 10 years ago — Sofiene HAMDAOUI Amor ...