8 Indian Forest Records . [Voi,. [VIII 
(3) “ Honey-dew”, the insect’s sugary excrement; of no com¬ 
mercial value. 
These substances are all manufactured by the insect from the 
material it sucks up from its “ host ’’-plant. The honey-dew is excret¬ 
ed, the lac-dye accumulated in the body and in the eggs, while the 
various components of “lac” are apparently elaborated in special 
secretory glands and exude like sweat from various parts of the body, 
the yield being specially abundant from the female during the period 
of gestation. 
On these processes—probably on all of them—the nature of the 
insect’s food, or the kind of plant on which it is living, has an influence 
in the sense that the lac produced by the same strain of lac insect 
from different plants will not be quite the same quality. It has 
indeed been thought that the part played by the insect is practically 
that of a strainer or filter—that the plant-juice is sucked up, some of 
its constituents absorbed and digested by the insect, and the rest 
excreted in the form of lac. 
In that case the composition of lac from a given plant will 
depend directly on the composition of its “ juice ”, and will probably 
vary a good deal with different plants. Personally we think there is 
no doubt that the other view is correct; that the insect “ manufactures ” 
the lac in its own body from raw materials that it gets from the 
plant-juice. The composition of the lac from a given plant will then 
depend only indirectly on the composition of its juice, and (as 
seems to be the case) will generally remain fairly constant whatever 
the plant from which its raw materials were derived. Whichever 
view may be the correct one, there is certainly some difference (espe¬ 
cially in colour, to which the trade attaches much importance) in the 
lac from different plants, and moreover the insect apparently tends 
in time to develop different physiological characteristics according 
to the plant on which it is kept. 
A list of the principal food-plants is given in Chapter II. The 
most important are :— 
(1) The Kusum ( Schleichera trijuga ). 
(2) The Ber ( Zizyphus Jujuba ). 
(3) The Ghont {Zizyphus xylopyrus ). 
(4) The Palas or Dhak (Butea frondosa). 
