I grew up on homemade maple syrup, and I would often help my aunt collect the sap from her sugar maples. Getting to two of the three large sugar maple trees involved trudging across an often snow covered lawn to the far corners of the property. I even tapped the trees for her a couple of years.

It's a 40 to 1 ratio to boil down the sap into syrup, so every pint that was produced was precious.

Today's commercial maple sugaring operations use plastic tubing and gravity to move the sap from the trees to a central collection location. Mother nature just needs to provide nighttime temperatures below freezing, and daytime temperatures above 32° for the sap to run.