Do you know how sweet a tree can be? Consider the sugar maple. Its sap is used to make maple syrup. Sugar maples can only be found in North America, and turn gold or orange in the fall.
Early American settlers learned from Native Americans how to tap these maple trees to make maple syrup. They collected maple sap by slashing the tree bark with a hatchet and letting the sap flow down into a hollowed-out log. They would then boil off the water in the sap by adding hot rocks to the log, leaving the sweet syrup behind.
Over time the spile was developed. This is a faucet placed in a small hole drilled into the tree. The first spiles were made of hollowed-out sumac branches. The sap would flow into buckets that were collected each day; the settlers would pour the sap into a very large pot over a hot fire and boil it; as it boiled, some of the water in the sap turned into steam and left the sap in the pot thicker and sweeter.
This takes plenty of time and energy because it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup.
Provided by Irvine Nature Center. For more, information visit www.explorenature.org.
