ALEXANDER, N.Y. (WIVB) - A product of the warm winter is sticky and sweet. Maple farms have to start making syrup early this year, and for Eric Randall of Randall's Maple Products, it's the earliest ever.

“There probably is nothing more closely tied to the weather than maple production. Everything is dependent on a cycle of thawing days and freezing nights,” said Randall

Ideally, Randall says he would like those temperatures in the 40's during the day and then below freezing at night for several days.

He explained, “The tree is filled with water; it’s a large percentage of water. What we do is tap in to about 10 years of growth and we break that column of water. As it warms up the gases expand and it is what drives the sap from the wound in the tree.”

So Randall has his trees tapped. Most of them are set up with a network of tubes that collect in a container.

Coming out of the tree, the sap looks like water. It only contains about two percent sugar. To make syrup, Randall needs to evaporate out the excess water until it is 66.5 percent sugar.

A machine heats the sap to seven degrees above the water boiling point, turning it into syrup. Since there is so much evaporating of water, it takes 44 gallons of sap to get just one gallon of syrup.

Each tree will produce 10 to 15 gallons of sap each year, which is why Randall has over 3,000 trees!