Ward Allen wrote a lively fiddle tune he called Maple Sugar in its honour. Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson thought it appropriate for us to have the leaf of the sugar maple as the emblem on our national flag.

The maple and its sugar are well known. Each spring hundreds of people across the country hang out their buckets and those that cannot, dream of maple syrup and home made bread.

Native people had their own names for maple syrup; sinzibuckwud (Algonquin), ninutik (Ojibway) and sisibaskwat (Cree). Spiles were made from pieces of willow that could be hollowed out and driven into the tree. Sap pails were made from bark and skins. Boiling was done by putting hot stones into clay or stone pots of sap.

Plastic pipe, evaporators, hygrometers, oil and gas furnaces, electric pumps, sugar extractors and government regulations have replaced spile, pail, sap pan and a good sense of what is choice maple syrup and what isn't. Fortunately the product does not seem to have suffered a great deal.

The science of just how sap flows is not common knowledge. All those that go with the flow and make syrup know that for the sap to run temperatures must be below freezing at night and warmer during the day. The run ends when the trees bud and the leaves begin to open.

The first sap of the run usually has about half the sugar concentration as compared to that at season’s end. It takes about 60 l of sap to make one litre of syrup (40:1 gallons). How well the sap runs seems to have little to do with the severity of the winter, the amount of snow on the ground, nor spring rains or wind.

Of the more than one hundred species of maple scattered over the northern hemisphere the sugar maple produces the most sugar per litre of sap, about twice the concentration as the silver or red maples.

But what makes the sap flow? One theory is that during the late summer and fall maple trees shunt large amounts of starch into long cells just inside the bark of the tree. As the weather turns cold the starch is turned into another form of sugar called sucrose. Over the winter this sucrose blends into nearby cells. During warm, sunny spring days, pressure increases within the tree. If there is a break in the bark or a tap hole the sap will run to it from all directions to relieve the pressure. On cool nights the pressure decreases and the flow stops. The longer these conditions last the better the syrup season.

Photos by Clayton Rollins