Frankincense Production in Somalia

Extracting Frankincense
gum in Somalia

These pictures from our most recent trip to Somalia show the extraction and cleaning of Frankincense gum. The pictures will take a little while to load over a modem Internet connection so you may need to be patient...

Picture 1
A gum collector making an incision in the Maydi tree. Over a period of years, many incisions will be made in each tree but collectors are careful not to 'over-produce' and rarely visit each tree more than twice in a season.

Picture 2
Freshly exuded gum from a beyo tree, which appears initially as a milky-white resin. This will solidify on exposure to air and harden within hours into a white-to-yellow crystal.

Picture 3
A Meydi tree, which only grows out of the sheer rock. Both Beyo and Maydi trees are 'self-propogating' as seeds find their way into the pores in the rocks. Occasionally they are sealed in these pores by liquid gum which has been blown off the trees. Some of the elders I spoke with say the seeds can lie dormant for hundreds of years. The trees live on minerals extracted from the rocks by the rootball.

Picture 4
A typical Beyo tree.

Picture 5
This is what Grade 1 gum looks like. This grade of gum commands a very high price on the markets in Saudi and other Arab states.

Picture 6
One of the very many warehouses around Bosaaso Port where the gum is cleaned by hand. The most productive workers can clean up to 25 kilos per working day.

Picture 7
After selection, this is a typical example of Mixed Grades 2 - 4. Providing the material is reasonably fresh, you will get a good quality essential oil from this gum.

Picture 8
Typical Mixed Grades 5 - 6 for industrial quality oil only.

Picture 9
Siftings and crude unrefinable gum, mainly for burning and rituals.

Picture 10
After selection, our gum is packed in 25 Kilo bags for transportation to the transhipment port in Saudi. Just over 400 of these bags made up our 10 Tonne shipment. It would take their best worker – working flat out all day, every day – over one year just to fulfill this order.

Picture 11
This is the nearest you will get to Federal Express in Somalia. Working to Somali Time, it took three days to get the 400 bags down to Bosaaso Port.