Resealing of Tap Holes Questions
My wife and I moved from northeast Alabama to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in September, 2020. Our property (20 acres) is chocked full of sugar maple trees. This is the start of my second maple season so I am still very much learning about this fine art of sugaring.
Last week I visited our trees with a drill in hand to tap our trees. I was looking for the hole from last year so that I could drill this year’s hole away from that area. Oddly, to me, I noticed that several of the holes were all sealed up while others looked just like they did last year when I removed the taps at the end of the season. The trees were either almost completely sealed or perfectly round with no in between. Note: there were only 16 trees involved in this sight experiment (though this year 25 trees were tapped).
Is there a reason as to why one tree would heal itself quickly while its direct neighbor has an ‘empty socket’? Is there any correlation to the health of a tree by its ability/inability to recover from tapping? Do some trees just naturally require more time to reseal? Do some trees simply never reseal?