One of my friends has a couple of maple trees in his yard. Last year we made plans to collect maple syrup from it, but we did not start in time to harvest very much sap. My friend bought all of the supplies and several other lab mates to help harvesting and refining the syrup.
We began by drilling holes into the trees or tapping the trees. The number of taps that a tree can support is dependent on its size. One of the trees was able to support two taps while the other could only support one. The holes needed to be angled upwards, so the sap would flow out.
Holes were drilled into the tree to allow sap to flow out.
Next a metal spout was put into the hole. The hole was widened with the drill so that the spout had a snug but not too tight fit which required a hammer for fixing it in place. The spout should not fall out from the weight of the sap but it needs to be removed from the tree at the end of the harvest.
Hammering in the spout
Finally we hung a plastic bag from the spout. The sap came out of the tree into the hole that we had drilled, flowed down the hole and out of the spout, and ended up in our bag.The bags needed to be replaced twice a day during the time of peak flow. One of the bags was bitten by a squirrel so the sap in it was lost.
This sap bag is hanging from the spout.
Next I will talk about doing the initial boiling of the sap.
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