 Welcome back to Maywood everybody and now I want to tell you about Maywood's most popular program of all maple sugar. In the late winters March, February, the sap begins to run in the maple trees and behind me is the Maywood Maple Forest. There are over 95 trees that are mature enough to be tapped for maple sap, which is boiled down into maple syrup. Particularly the species of choice is acer saccharum to use a Latin word or as you might recall it the sugar maple. The sugar maple trees here have a very sweet sap which begins to flow as thawing occurs outside. Once the air temperature really rises above 32 degrees on a more permanent basis, sap will begin to rise from the roots under the ground and flow into the tree. And we're going to take a little bit closer look at that process and also give you an opportunity to participate in it yourself. As we take a closer look at one of our maple trees here on the property, there are a couple of ways to identify a maple tree even if you don't have the leaves on it. The sugar maple bark is probably its most distinctive feature. Notice how this bark is almost peeling away like it has a skin problem if you will. I always say to the kids that visit us, the fourth graders, that this skin is very flaky, flaky bark if you will. Kind of like if you have a flaky brother or sister. That's a good way to remember the flakiness of a maple tree. And also as you take a look gradually up to the top of the tree, the maple has branches that come out on all sides. Particularly the near side of the tree because it is the south side, it's getting the most sun. But it's a very gnarled huge look. It isn't quite like the oak tree which just has the branches coming out at the very top. Also a difference between this and the oak is that there are still leaves on some of the oak trees this time of year. As you take a closer look, another identification mark of our trees here on the property would certainly be holes left by tapping it. The larger hole which I'll finger or thumb size hole, we call that a spile hole. That's what we drill into the tree a couple of inches and we add a spile into the tree so that the sap can be drawn out. You may also notice smaller holes on maple trees like this and these will you'll find in any kind of a maple forest even if it's not tapped for sugar. Well these holes come from a bird, the yellow-bellied sap sucker. It's a type of woodpecker that given its name you might think it sucks sap but actually that's an error. What the animal is really doing is it's drilling into the tree hoping that insects will get stuck caught in the sap and then the bird will come back at a later date and it will devour the insects in the sap for its food. Kind of a unique adaptation that bird's gotten for survival. Well here we are in front of probably the most important part of any maple syruping farm the sugar house or as we call it the sugar shack. This is a very important part of this farm and indeed it is a farm when you think about it Wisconsin is the number three maple syruping producing state in the entire nation New York and Vermont are one and two. The maple syruping farm operation would not be complete without taking the raw sweet sap boiling off the water to produce the syrup and next to me is also a very large pile of wood huge pile of wood that will be consumed in the process of boiling away the water to take a gallon of maple syrup the finished product you need 40 gallons of sap a process of burning at least eight to ten hours is required to take those 40 gallons of sap boiling away the water to produce the syrup you can continue to boil it longer and you'll get molasses even longer than that and you'll get a crystalline maple sugar and of course many of us have seen maple sugar or maybe maple candy all of those are important products and Wisconsin is a viable member in that industry now there is a way to participate in maybewood's maple sugaring program all fourth graders in the entire county are invited to come visit us in the month of March you just make it an appointment with me and our phone number is 459-3906 and we have special maple sugaring tours that have been very popular for the years in fact may what has been established statewide as it with a good reputation for its maple sugaring program the last 10 years we call a bit and a brace here's the drill bit and this is the brace everyone will get a chance to try this out for themselves after you watch me now here's one of the important things that you need to understand when you use the bit in the brace first of all this point on here is a little bit dangerous it's also fragile you don't want to break it off and you don't want to pass it to a friend like this and say oh here you got to be careful also when i'm drilling i'm about waist height see it's really large rounded part of me that sticks straight out that's my stomach so my waist is in there and as i push this in just a little bit i'm gonna use my right hand on the end of this and my left hand will do the turning notice how my feet are spread apart that gives me some nice leverage and balance and i'm going to turn it clockwise into the wood you guys know clockwise right yeah i'm drilling into the wood does anybody remember how far i'm supposed to drill in remember at the very beginning i showed you a spile in the tree and yeah how far is that's how many inches are you remember Erica an inch and a half not a half an inch but an inch and a half you can also rest your stomach against here like i'm doing especially if you got a real big gut like me okay i bought about an inch and a half and i can go out the other way and as i pull out boom there we go nice tree is this tree gonna give me sap no afraid not this is a dead tree but i want everyone to get a chance to try this you're gonna line up behind one of these poles here we're gonna make three lines and then i'll give you a bit in a brace and you can get started okay there's some more people can go over here okay you guys can start here why don't you get a line right behind her there's plenty of room yep you can do that one i'm gonna do about waist high there you go can you guys just go here in adults we can just sort of help supervise here to make sure that nobody gets killed hello clockwise there we go dude that's not a tree man there's one in every group yeah it's fantastic look at her go okay what's your name again pretty right clockwise there you go i want you all to see how a bed looks on the and the modern system of us collecting sap from the maple tree this is indeed a maple tree you guys remember how to tell a difference from a maple tree and other trees leaves that helps you find their leaf around here yeah they're kind of crunched down and some of them aren't even maple leaves isn't that a good time of the year to finally you found a oak well maybe this is the oak tree anybody else know how to tell a maple tree in the winter yeah yeah i love that answer except that's what the third graders say not worth it look for holes in the tree but what if you get to a forest where people haven't been and the drilled holes in the tree how do you tell cassie yes the bark that's a great answer the bark on a maple tree is kind of gray in color and it's flaky it almost looks like it's peeling off like it has a bad case of a sunburn and it's coming off there's another way to tell that's because of the branches it's got lots of branches all over the maple tree and sometimes there aren't any little holes on a tree like this that aren't made by people they're about the same size in the pencil and they're made by a special kind of wood pecker a special kind of wood pecker it's called a yellow belly sap sucker by the name what do you think the yellow belly sap sucker sucks you'd be wrong though actually they're drilling into the tree and sap will collect in there then little tiny critters crawl up in there they get stuck in the sap and they come back and they eat them like an ant or something so they should call them yellow belly uh bug suckers i thought that would be a good answer for them but they're not he does this guy doesn't like my jokes so you guys yeah that's better that's better okay now let's take a good look at the sap nice and clear as you guys tasted a little earlier looks just like water most of it is water this type of bag works perfect for collecting sap and as you can see today i think there's a little bit of sap coming out it's all over the tree see how we had to we had to drill two holes in this tree this first hole wasn't drilled correctly it wasn't really put in there at the right angle so we re-drilled a hole but sometimes some comes out of the top hole and goes into this bag as well as what's in the regular hole yes katie the sap is definitely sticky yeah just a little bit not like glue but it's a little bit sticky i want you to come on over here i need a volunteer to take this we're going to empty it out you can go ahead and try that one ashley let's go and dump this into the bag with a bucket you have one corner with your hand okay and the other corner with the other hand carefully dump that in there we're gonna pick two people that carry this there you go yeah the sap is dripping very nicely today if you want to get more sap from the tree you gotta hug it so squeeze that tree real hard i love your tree you're my best friend oh look at the drip now it's going like crazy look at the drip you see i was i was kidding look at that okay let it go it's probably suffocating see it works it works a lot of sap you want to carry this one here as a carry one most of the trees at me would have plastic bags um collecting the sap on we hang a bucket we hang a plastic bucket underneath the plastic bag because sometimes squirrels nip holes in the bag and instead of that way if a squirrel would bite a hole in the bag we would still be able to collect it in the bucket i want you to be careful right behind the railing because his drop off is very steep right here what we wanted you to see in this part of the area is how we can tap trees that are very hard to get to remember the number one state that produces maple sugar what was that Vermont exactly there's a lot of hills it's a beautiful beautiful state but there's a lot of hills and even mountains and it's hard to get to all of their trees so they came up with the system of tapping trees so they don't have to climb all of them and this is a gravity pipeline or a spaghetti line from tree here right in front of us you can see the purple line going down the hillside to a larger blue line afternoon i emptied that drum it was full to the top it had out in it it was actually overflowing had a big chuck of ice in it too so this is an important thing and you can see it looks like somebody has fallen down here a couple of times there's still volunteers from 94 we haven't found yet that are down there hard to find a teepee like this they use these out in the plains for the most part but this gives us a little bit of an idea of the native americans the indians and how they would do the process of maple sugaring and maple syruping how could they take the sap and boil away the water does anyone know how they did that air cuff okay that would be the make that would make sense wouldn't it they fill up their log with the sap and they just take it and they put it right in the fire what's the problem with that kassie what's the matter with that maybe okay if they had laid they probably wouldn't have bricks like this but maybe they had big rocks like that yeah okay or like give you a hint the answer is in the rocks the answer is in the rocks oh no the fire's already started what do you think what the rocks underneath there sit the rocks underneath there it's okay not going to get hot enough no heat up the rocks with the rocks in here put the rocks in the sap there you go okay they would take the rocks on the fire and oh man that's hot oh oh oh Jesus hot no it's not hot they could use the tool like this and try and pick up a hot rock put it in there everybody go okay good and then it boils away the water just like a sauna you guys ever been in a sauna yeah you know what one is okay you have yeah wow you guys must be from a really good part of town huh you have saunas well it takes a long time to boil away the water that way not like we do it with the evaporator so usually the indians would boil away all the water they didn't make maple syrup for the most part because it's hard to store unless you wanted to carry on like a deer spleen with syrup in it so what they did was they boiled it all the way down to maple sugar maple candy that way it could be dried and they could keep it throughout the whole year pretty zoomy huh i think that's cool everybody go wow wow cool now we gotta do some walking i need some people to carry that okay come on in everybody i want you to get in nice and close here to the evaporator you remember from our program that the evaporating house we call it the sugar house or the sugar shack and ed waymeyer over here is our longtime caretaker and he takes care of the sap now this white stuff you see in the air what do you think this is okay it's one of those two i'll give you you got it on kitty yeah exactly it's water it's steam evaporating now remember back to the slide program if we evaporate or take away all the water what's left behind what's gonna be left behind yeah sugar sugar she's got it fantastic sap is made of two things sugar and water and we want the sugar left behind does anybody remember what percent of sap is sugar kitty hundred not quite a hundred what percent of sap is sugar even a little bit less 99 okay it's about 98 or 99 percent water and then for therefore at least one to two percent sugar it's about two percent maybe three percent and a really good year if you guys have a cold see this is good to breathe that steam in there the ice and it doesn't hurt your lungs it fills you up your your body with all these good healing spirits of steam now i want you guys to get a chance once you look at that step back and we'll let you taste some of this sap that we have uh saved over here sure i'll try to take one of those and pass it back to somebody whoa hey guys once you get a cup you guys get one keep them going keep them going we have more but once i give you a little bit step back okay so everybody gets a taste well what's in sap sugar and sugar water we want to give you the stuff inside the evaporator it's just a little bit more if you were at home trying to make some sugar water you could take a big glass of water add just a pinch of sugar and you'd have about the same taste as what you have now and if you wanted to get rid of or evaporate the water with your adult supervision from your mom or dad you could boil away that water on the stove and the only thing left would be again that pinch of sugar and that's exactly what ed's doing over here this takes all day and even into the night to boil down about a hundred gallons this tank behind me right here that milk holding tank is where we drain the sap remember when you're up above we saw the washing machine the washing machine will drain the sap as it's filtered into this holding tank which holds a couple of hundred gallons into where the tank is ed can move it from the big tank to the evaporator by hand he just puts in about five gallons at a time like he's doing right now this is a very complex and highly scientific system remember with other filtering system that i showed you was a ringer washing machine this one is an old screen from like a window and you can see how that filters out even a couple of chunks in there see that i think there's uh mostly wings and legs anybody find any of that in your in your cup i don't tell you that until after we drink it protein yeah it's good for you there is one thing i wanted to show you right before we finish oh hey all right thanks a couple of different things first of all last year in 1995 1995 we tapped about 90 trees that's about the same number of trees that we've tapped this year in that year we used 125 spiles so in other words the reason that number's bigger some trees had more than one it's fine some have three or four even good sap huh oh yeah all right gallons of syrup that we produced last year 35 gallons of syrup that's a lot of maple syrup but to get that syrup we had to collect 1,400 gallons of sap that's a whole lot of sap now who can do this in your mind think real hard now if we had made 35 gallons of sap syrup from this 1,400 gallons of sap how many gallons of sap does it take to make just one gallon of syrup got to do some division in your mind here how many gallons of sap will it take to make a gallon of syrup any guesses i see these wheels turning and that's good that's what we like to see any guesses they're working hard your math geniuses out there keep the app on top of the evaporating pan we use an instrument what does this look like yes it looks like a thermometer and what does a thermometer do it tells the temperature this doesn't take the temperature of the sap this actually takes the density reading of the sap density or thickness now you've all seen maple syrup on your table is it thick or thin it's thick especially when you compare it to water so if this is very watery like sap i'll drop this in and it's going to sink to the bottom of the pan but as the water evaporates and sugar is left behind it'll thicken the density increases and so when i drop this in it won't float or it won't sink it will float and there are numbers on here that indicate when we can take it off that evaporator if we leave it on there too long it's going to burn it's going to get scorched and it won't taste very good so we have to throw it out so this instrument is very important and we call it a hydrometer that's the special instrument and this is the most important thing in the whole process this hydrometer knowing when to take off the sap from the evaporating pan and then we can bottle it and we'll filter it one more time as well so this process we filter it a lot yes this i have to especially order it all the way from maveruma that comes from a long distance costs like thirty bucks there is one official thing that we need to do i forgot to tell you this we have to pass a test before we get to try our uh our well i didn't tell you what the reward was did i you think so see all these things on the left side of the board these are these names or or descriptions that are in pink have a matching picture on the right hand side so in order for us to get our reward we need to complete this group of twelve matching items now i'd like to just simply go along the the group here and we can have everybody try it if they want no pressure you don't have to do this the biggest thing is to give it a try you don't have to if you're not right that's okay uh we'll start over with uh cassie the sugar shack the building where it all takes place absolutely good job well we want you guys to do as we know you just came from uh school and you had lunch recently the key is to not give you a big pancake breakfast or lunch the key isn't pancakes at all we want you to taste the real maple syrup that we make here and see how you like it compared to the stuff you might find at home maybe some of you guys make this at home a lot of people do in