Maple syrup is made from the sap of three different species of maple tree. The trees are bled for weeks but not allowed to die… kind of like the middle class in the United States…
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Maple Syrup is expensive. It takes fifty gallons of tree sap to make a single gallon of syrup. On the other hand, tree sap is cheap… you can make fifty gallons of it with only one gallon of syrup. This keeps tree sap well within the budget of the average shopper.
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Until the day she died, Tina Turner had not come out for or against maple syrup.
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There are three grades of maple syrup: There’s Grade A, which means it doesn’t kill you instantly; Processing Grade, which, I imagine, is used to feed circus elephants and aphids; finally, there’s Fetish Grade Maple Syrup, when you absolutely have to fill a children’s sized pool.
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Maple syrup is magical. It can turn a stack of flavorless flatbread into something you’d blind and torture your grandmother to eat.
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The Iroquois invented maple syrup long before the European settlers arrived. Archaeologists think that an unnamed native American accidentally drilled holes into multiple maple trees and unwittingly collected sap until he had at least twenty gallons. Then, he inadvertently boiled it for days until syrup was formed. “Oops!”, he was reported to have said.
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Canada’s largest producer of syrup is Quebec… I think… Actually, I don’t understand French so I miss about half of what they say.
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Maple syrup is a great source of manganese; so, if you routinely consume maple syrup, you will greatly reduce the number of times a month you’ll have to drive to the manganese store.
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Maple sugar is healthier than honey; but, I prefer using honey because it really irritates bees when you harvest it.
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Remember that maple sugar is harvested and refined right here in North America. That makes it easier to convince yourself to buy it when you realize that maple sugar costs twenty times what white sugar does. Do it for America! Do it for the MANGANESE!
Potatoes and the Promise of More Potatoes 
My husband made syrup when he was young. If people realized how much work goes into one little bottle they wouldn’t complain about the price.
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I know what work goes into it but only because I’ve been researching. They cut back on the amount of time by using reverse-osmosis to concentrate the sap before heating and evaporation. I had a Maine joke about relying on maple sugar saying “No wonder pet cemeteries in Maine disgorge their dead” but, I rejected it because, who’s ever heard of Stephen King?
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Stephen who…?
The maple productions today are streamlined and semi automated, in my husband’s day you tapped every tree yourself, hauled buckets by hand and stayed up for 48 hours straight stirring in that sweltering sap house. Not a job for the faint of heart, or back.
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Now I have a new use for my syrup when I overcook it. Some of the best tubing for steel bike frames is manganese-molybdenum steel. I could never get my hands on enough manganese to make my own.
As for bleeding the trees without killing them, it depends on the ethics of the syrup maker. You can bleed the tree the way George Washington was bled (he died from blood loss after three different doctors bled him to cure his cold) or it can be more like blood donation, where you get a bit short of breath with exertion for a day or two but then you’re fine.
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You’re talking about Mangalloy… not only a tough corrosion resistant metal but Mangalloy also defeated Mothra in Godzilla vs Monsters Too Obscure to Name.
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