Maple Syrup (This column was published in the March 23, 1992 Buffalo News.) Steve Eaton is a retired St. Bonaventure University biology professor who remains active on his Shadbush Farm east of Salamanca. There he tends a dozen beehives, raises blueberries, and manages a maple woodlot of 540 trees. Early this month Steve let me spend a day with him as he processed 200 gallons of sap into just over three gallons of maple syrup. (He refined ten gallons of syrup the day before.) I had offered to help out in exchange for the opportunity to learn about this activity, but my help consisted mainly of dodging out of his way as Steve calmly turned from task to task. He hauled firewood, stoked the fire, cleaned and filled the tanks, watched the level and characteristics of the roiling sap and syrup, constantly checked the temperature gauges, and at precisely the right time drew off pails of lovely brown liquid. Between other chores he found time to filter this syrup and decant it into quart jugs that look exactly like Appalachian moonshine crocks. Carefully measuring the color of his syrup, he marked each cruet in this batch dark amber. The darker color signaled the approaching end of the season with only commercial grade syrup tainted by amino acids yet to come. Producers refer to this increasingly unpalatable later brew as buddy syrup, because it is associated with physiological changes in the tree as it begins to bud. But now Steve offered me a spoonful of his still hot syrup. I found it delightful, the best I had ever tasted. After that I hovered close, fingering to my mouth the occasional spilled drop. Maple trees are uniquely North American. Native Americans introduced them to the European newcomers, demonstrating how they poured sap into hollowed-out logs and added heated stones to boil away the water. The colonists soon improved upon this process. Iron cauldrons replaced hollow logs. Later a series of heating pans were used with sap poured from one to the next as it thickened. More recently came enclosed evaporators like Steve's with channels through which the increasingly dense liquid flows. Today large producers use huge oil fired evaporators and add a stage of reverse osmosis to improve the processing still further. One of these major producers, Randy Sprague, who taps over 14,000 trees in Portville, sold Steve this small 250 gallon evaporator, showed him how to use it, and continues to provide advice and assistance. Additional support, Steve tells me, comes from state and Western New York Maple Associations and from agricultural extension programs. He is clearly pleased with his friendly contacts through these groups with many dairy farmers who enjoy this ""between seasons'' activity. As the fire slowly died from his day's operation, Steve led me up into his sugar bush to see how he collected the maple sap. When I first observed syrup making forty years ago they used buckets. It was only last fall, while hiking near Centerville, that I first met the kind of tubing that Steve used here. My path had been suddenly crisscrossed with a spider web of colored hoses and I first thought that I had come upon a new kind of fencing. Only when I found the big bathtub-like steel collecting basins was I able to figure out their use. Steve's woodlot is conveniently located on a steep hillside above his sugar shack so his tapping tubes are assisted by gravity. Even so there was no sap moving. This and the rosy buds of the more advanced red maples confirmed that the syrup season was almost complete. I realized as we hiked through this pretty copse that I was seeing only part of this operation. Steve would soon have to remove his tubes for washing and sanitizing, repair sections broken by falling trees or gnawed by squirrels, clean out his evaporator and firebox, and thin his woodlot of competing trees. All this work and investment in equipment for a season producing thirty to forty gallons of syrup. My high regard for Steve himself and farmers in general was again confirmed. Their work can never be valued too highly.