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My Grandfather used to make maple syrup. One year I helped out. Here are some pictures.
He only had three trees of his own that he could tap, but he knew where all the sugar maple trees in the area were, (this was Wayne County, PA) and he had permission to tap them if he gave the land owners a little of each batch he made. He didn't use gravity fed hoses like the professional operations do. He would do it the old fashioned way. Go out with a bit and brace and drill a hole. Tap the little round plug spigot thing (called a tap?) into the hole and hang the bucket on it. Then you hook the lid on top of that so dirt will stay out of the sap. The sap starts to slowly drip out right away. Each day, the sap will run up the tree to the limbs, and then back down to the roots as it gets cool at night. On each trip, a bunch of it drips into the bucket. You can put a couple of buckets on each tree, but you don't want to do too many, because it will hurt the tree. As the season progresses, the sap that drips out of the bucket gets darker and darker. On a warm day, more sap will drip out, and you might need to empty the buckets twice in one day. On colder days, the buckets might get an inch or so of sap in them. If you go too early in the morning to collect the sap, the buckets have a layer of ice in them, which is a slight hassle because when you dealt with that ice, you'd invariably spill some sap. If you taste the raw sap, it's faintly sweet and has a mild maple syrup flavor.
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