Honey

Honey is the sweet fluid produced by honey bees from the nectar of flowers. Worker honey bees change the  nectar that they gather into honey. It takes 2,000,000 blossoms to make 1 pound of honey.

Bees make the edible wax comb in the hive. The honey is stored in the honeycomb in the hive. The beekeeper extracts the honey from the comb or sells the honeycomb.

Maple
Warm days and cool nights cause the sap to run through the trees. The maple season can last from 4 to 6 weeks. A sugar maple tree is usually 30 years old before it is tapped. Depending on its size, a tree can have up to four taps. Many of New York’s maple producers have put away their metal taps and buckets. They save time and collect more sap by connecting their maple trees with a network of plastic tubing. The sap flows to collecting vats or, in some larger operations, is pumped directly to the sugar house. This is where the sap is transformed into syrup. When the sap first arrives in the sugar house it is mostly water. The sap is changed to syrup by boiling most of the water away. It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon syrup. Syrup is labeled and graded in three types: Light, Medium, and Dark Amber.