Do you enjoy eating pancakes with sweet and sticky maple syrup on a cold winter morning? Who doesn't!

Have you ever thought about where the maple syrup comes from or how it is made? To answer this question, we need to think about plants and how they almost miraculously use sunlight to fuel their growth.

While you and I need to consume food (such as pancakes and maple syrup) for energy, plants use a process, called PHOTOSYNTHESIS to make sugars from sunlight, water, and air (carbon dioxide)! These sugars help plants grow and produce energy.

Some plants, such as potatoes and maple trees, store their sugars for later use. Potatoes store sugars as starch in the potato tubers to fuel future plant growth. Maple trees store sugars in their sap during the winter so that the plant can grow leaves in spring. Every year maple syrup farmers harvest this sap and transform it into maple syrup. See below for information about photosynthesis and watch a video about how maple syrup is made!

Watch the video below to learn about how we harvest the sugar water (sap) from the sugar maple tree and transform it into thick and delicious maple syrup!