Tapping a Maple Tree

Ah, the blessed sugar maple. Abundant in eastern Canada and the southeast US, these beautiful trees are basically maple syrup fairies in disguise. While my rural hometown is famous for the square root of nothing at all, it does have a small claim to fame as one of the biggest maple syrup producing areas in Quebec. Hey ho! This is how they do it. Gone are the days of tapping maples by hand, collecting sap in a bucket and doing the rounds day in and day out when it starts to flow - this is serious stuff. Trees are tapped and sap is collected through these little intravenous-like devices which deliver sap back to a main artery. So easy! Then again, it takes about 40 L of sap to make 1 L of syrup (from a sugar maple; the ratio is 1:70 from a regular maple), so it's not necessarily a walk in the park. But the results are truly yummy...