Keeping bugs out of a sap bucket
One downside to using a bucket
to collect sap is the bugs.
We modified this lid with a
piece of metal screen material to help keep our sap more pure.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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deb --- I know! Great, huh?
Doc --- To be honest, I didn't peer closely enough to really identify them. Although there was a house-type fly or two, it's mostly bugs that look like a mixture between a large gnat and a small mosquito. They're clearly attracted to the sugar in the sap because there are about ten times as many in the sugar maple sap as in the box-elder sap. On nice days when the sap is running, we usually have about a dozen bugs per bucket.