Sap only flows first day

[bellefonte_tapper]

I live in Bellefonte PA and this is my first time with tapping trees. We tapped about 10 trees on Saturday, which gave us a good amount of sap. The following three days have given us next to nothing. Is this to be expected or did we do something wrong? Somehow did the holes seal up? Any advice would be welcomed.

[SilverLeaf]

Tap holes will dry out, but it takes a lot longer than a few days for that to happen! ;)

What's the weather been like since Sunday? If it's either been 1) above freezing the whole time - day and night, or 2) below freezing the whole time - day and night, that's the likely cause. The sap flows good when it freezes at night and thaws during the day.

Good luck!

[bellefonte_tapper]

The temperature has been pretty warm (today in the low 50's) and the lows have been slightly less than freezing. Not sure why we would get a quarter of what we got the first day?

[SilverLeaf]

An ideal freeze/thaw cycle is a night that gets down to 20 followed by a sunny day that gets up to 40. My guess is that it just didn't get cold enough for your trees to "recharge" overnight.

Pray for a little bit colder weather!:lol:

[bellefonte_tapper]

Thanks for the quick response. I was worried I was doing something wrong. I will watch it and pray for colder weather. Wow I don't normally pray for cold weather after a long winter :)

[stoweski]

Even though this is my first year tapping I am disappointed in the weather. I have had two nights in the past two weeks where temps have been below 32! Both were in the mid 20's and gave me 40 gallons on Saturday and 35 gallons on Sunday. Other than that I have mostly dry buckets. Collected 17 gallons yesterday and then 5 today.

Here's hoping for a cool down - otherwise the buds will start popping!

[The Dude]

I'm in Bellefonte too, and this is also my first year, so maybe we can use each other for comparison in the next few weeks.

I've been tapped since Feb 19, which was good for letting me catch up with the learning process. The cold spell from about Feb 22 up until around March 3 made it pretty much unnecessary to be tapped in the woods here until about a week ago. Hopefully you have trees out in the open with better crowns and more sun than mine.

[bellefonte_tapper]

Our taps produced a bit more today than the last few days but still nothing like the first day. Since Saturday we have gathered about 35 gallons of sap off of 21 taps.

We can definitely compare going forward. Good luck fighting off the warm weather.

[The Dude]

It seems we are getting about the same amount of sap. I have 13 taps and collected about 20 gallons of sap since Friday or Saturday. It seems we are both at about 1/3 gallon per tap per day.

Are your taps on wooded trees? What size are the trunks and how are the crowns? Mine are 12" trees on average with small to medium crowns because of the forest structure, nothing like a tree out in the open would be.

[The Dude]

Bellefonte Tapper, have your trees produced anything in the last 4-5 days? Mine have all but turned off, only about a gallon (of sap!) combined from 13 taps since last Thursday.

[skillet]

Bad year so far collected 100 gallons on 85 taps in 7 days (lost about 50 ga when 4 feet of snow melted and buckets fell over). Then 5 gallons the last 4 days combined. :(

[bellefonte_tapper]

Actually yesterday I got about 5 Gallons of sap, nothing over the weekend. Some of our trees are larger and can hold 3 or 4 taps. We are getting most of our sap from the larger trees. Hoping to get more today. Sorry for the slow reply, I was out of town this weekend.