Endangered and in high demand, now there is a shortage.

At the Top of Texas Catholic Superstore in Amarillo, owner Moneisa Thompson said she noticed one-ounce packages of frankincense disappearing from displays in her 3,800-square-foot store about four months ago. She has since moved the packages into a glass case.

A boswellia tree, which produces frankincense, in Yemen.”We’d go through the count and we’d come up one or two short,” Ms. Thompson said. “We had to put it under lock and key.”

For many Christians, frankincense is best known as one of the gifts—along with gold and myrrh—that the three wise men brought to Jesus and his parents shortly after he was born. The resin still is prized for its fragrance and used in some religious ceremonies.

The incense comes from the resin of the boswellia, a stout, gnarly-branched tree that mostly grows in the Horn of Africa. But encroaching agriculture and insects threaten to kill off most of the region’s boswellia within the next 50 years, according to a study published this week in the Journal of Applied Ecology by a team of Dutch and Ethiopian ecologists.

via A Shift for the Magi? Frankincense Shortage.

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