Maple trees give us one of nature’s sweetest treats! In late winter and early spring, when it is freezing cold at night and warmer during the day, a sweet liquid called sap starts flowing through the tree like water running through a straw. People drill a small hole into the trunk and put in a little spout called a tap, and the sap drips out into a bucket or through a tube. Not all maple trees are used for syrup though. The sugar maple is the best one because its sap has the most sugar in it! Indigenous peoples in North America were the very first people to discover maple syrup hundreds of years ago.
Here is a wild fact: it takes about 40 gallons of watery sap to make just one single gallon of maple syrup! That is like filling a whole bathtub with sap just to get a small jug of syrup. The sap is boiled in big pots or special machines called evaporators for a long time, and as all the water boils away, the sap gets thicker, darker, and sweeter until it becomes that golden, sticky maple syrup we love to pour on our pancakes and waffles. Most of the world’s maple syrup comes from Canada, especially the province of Quebec, and the maple leaf is even on the Canadian flag!
