Deborah Allred, age 9, of Burlington, N.C., for her question:

Where do they get maple sugar?

All our sugary candies and yummy sweet goodies are gifts to us from the world of plants. Different plants give us the ingredients to make delicious chocolate and crunchy caramels, tangy licorice and the fresh flavors of mint and lemon. One plant even gives us the stuff to make chewing gum. And maple sugar is a gift from the maple tree.
Mary different maple trees thrive in North America. Through the summer, they spread their shady branches high and wide. Their paper thin leaves are like open hands bordered with sharp pointed fingers. The boughs are hung with clusters of brown keys, which are really seeds fitted with wings for gliding away from the parent trees.
Come fall, the green leaves change to brighter colors. The red maple of the swampland changes to vivid scarlet. The shady sugar maple may change to yellow or rusty gold, bright orange or vivid scarlet. This is the friendly tree that gives us the hardest of the golden brown maple woods. It also gives us mouth watering maple syrup to pour on our pancakes and crunchy maple sugar to make the sweetest of all sweet candies.
The sugar maple may stand as tall as 80 feet, which is as high as 12 tall men. It grows in the east, all the way from Canada down into the Southland. Some of the sugar maples of New England were planted by the Pilgrims more than 300 years ago. Most of our syrup and sugar comes from the sugar maples of New England and Canada. The sweet stuff comes from the sap that flows through the trunks and bare branches in early spring.
The sugar maple needs the right weather to produce a lot of this sweet sap. It does best when spring brings spells of frost and thaw or when the nights are cold and the days are mild. AS a rule, the time to gather the sap comes in March. The farmers crunch across the snow and drill holes sloping upward in the tree trunks. Each hole is perhaps an inch wide and two inches long. A spout is fitted into the opening. A pail is hung to catch the dripping sap as it oozes out of the tree.
The maple sap is pale arid watery. It 18 boiled and boiled until the water escapes, leaving behind rich, dark maple syrup, sweeter than sweet. If the syrup is boiled some more, it becomes crunchy maple sugar. A good tree may give 10 gallons of sap, which will make a quart of syrup or two pounds of maple sugar.
The sugary sap is gathered from the maples of Vermont and parts of Pennsylvania, from New Hampshire and northern New York, from Michigan and Ohio. Still more is gathered from Quebec and Ontario in Canada. Each year these friendly trees yield six million gallons of sap. Lots of work and endless patience are needed to turn these rivers of sap into 150,000 gallons of maple syrup or 600 tons of map1e sugar.