A beekeeper, a magi, and a wind tunnel technician walk into a bar...

So what do beekeepers, magi, and wind tunnel technicians have in common?

(That's one of those odd triplets that really doesn't seem to belong together at all, isn't it?)

They all smell like frankincense!

Today we got an order of frankincense in at work (a sampler pack from India, Oman, Somalia, Estonia...) to test out how it would work in creating smoke for our wind tunnel applications. So I spent the whole morning with a little piece of charcoal dropping different samples of frankincense to see which one produced the best smoke or had the best scent to it.

For those of you who don't know, frankincense was one of the three gifts the magi brought to Bethlehem when Jesus was born (gold, frankincense, and myrrh). It is used mainly in religious rites (Picture the catholic priest walking down the aisle with the alterboys swinging the smoking gold pot behind him. That's frankincense.) but also goes by the name of bee gum. Beekeepers use it to charge their smoke guns when they smoke out the hives. The actual frankincense comes from the hardened sap (or resin) of the Boswellia tree.

So there's your nifty little tidbit of information. Whoever thought I'd be playing with frankincense in an actual engineering application? Learn something new every day.