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| Sticky Sweet Sugar Maple Sap |
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 Sub-freezing nights and mild days start the sap flowing in Ohio's maple trees, signaling maple syrup festival time in some Ohio state parks.
From Sun to Sugar
The summer sun powers the tree's sugar-making factory. Green leaves use the sun’s energy to produce sugar. Sugar is the food that helps the tree grow.
Here is how it works (kind of): Chlorophyll (klawr-uh-fil) is a green pigment that can absorb the sun’s energy. It helps combine carbon dioxide from the air with water from the tree’s roots to make sugar molecules. This process is called photosynthesis (foh-tuh-sin-thuh-sis).
From Sugar to Sap
During the fall, extra sugar is stored in the tree's roots for the winter. Late in the winter as the days get warmer, the sugar is drawn up through the tree’s trunk along with the water. (Imagine yourself drinking through a straw.) This sugar water, known as sap, is on its way to the new leaf buds to help them grow.
From Sap to Syrup
Late winter, when the sap starts to flow inside the tree trunk, is syrup time. All trees make sap, but the sap from maple trees makes some of the tastiest syrup.
Back in frontier times, the Native Americans used to make a deep cut into the tree’s trunk and catch the sap as it oozed out. They collected the sap in a bowl made from a hollowed out tree trunk. They built a fire and heated rocks on the hot coals. Then they put the hot rocks in the bowl with sap. When most of the water boiled away, they enjoyed the sticky leftovers we call maple syrup.
The pioneers learned how to make syrup from their Native American neighbors. Today, we have shiny buckets and energy efficient evaporators instead of wooden bowls and rocks, but the idea is much the same as it was more than 250 years ago.
Sappy Facts
The sugar content of maple sap ranges from one to four percent.
Trees are tapped by drilling a hole 7/16th of an inch in diameter and 3 inches deep into the tree.
Throughout the sugar season, a tap hole will drain about ten gallons of sap from a single sugar maple. This is only a small portion of the trees’ total sap production and will not hurt the tree.
One quart is the average amount of maple syrup that can be made from ten gallons. The amount can also vary greatly from year to year, and depends on the length of the season, sweetness of the sap, and other conditions of nature, such as weather, soil, tree genetics, and tree health. A healthy sugar maple can provide sap every year for a hundred years or more.
Sweet Legends
There are many Native American legends as to how maple sugar was first discovered. One legend tells of an Iroquois Chief by the name of Woksis who threw his tomahawk into a maple tree one late winter evening only to discover the next morning sap flowing from the mark in the tree. The sap was then used to boil the meat for dinner and as the water in the sap boiled away, a wonderful, sweet maple taste was left.
Native Americans would eat “sapsicles” – the icicles of frozen sugar maple sap as it formed on the end of a branch.
During the heat of summer a special Native American treat was a drink made of maple sugar dissolved in water.
Discover for yourself this sticky sweet process by visiting the following state parks as they host their annual Maple Syrup Festival this sugaring season; Caesar Creek in Warren county, Hocking Hills in Hocking county, Hueston Woods in Preble county, and Malabar Farm in Richland county. For more information, dates, and times visit our state parks events page. |
| Photos from left to right: sugar cabin at Malabar Farm State Park; Native American re-enactment of making maple syrup in a hollowed out log; sugar maple tree tap hole. |
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