Abstract
The collection of maple sap for the production of maple syrup is a large commercial enterprise in Canada and the United States. In Canada, which produces 85% of the world’s supply, it has an annual value of over $168 million CAD. Over 38 million trees are tapped annually, 6.5% of which use traditional buckets for sap collection. These buckets attract significant numbers of insects. Despite this, there has been very little investigation of the scale of this phenomenon and the composition of insects that are attracted to this nutrient source. The present paper reports the results of a preliminary study conducted on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Twenty-eight species of Coleoptera, Lepidoptera, and Trichoptera were found in maple sap buckets, 19 of which are known to be attracted to saps and nectars. The physiological role of sap feeding is discussed with reference to moths of the tribe Xylenini, which are active throughout the winter, and are well documented as species that feed on sap flows. Additionally, 18 of the 28 species found in this study are newly recorded in Prince Edward Island.
Highlights
The collection of maple sap for the production of maple sugar has a long history in North America
In the case of some species of Coleoptera (i.e., Ellychnia corrusca, Cyphon variabilis, C. confusus, and Nudobius cephalus (Say)) these new records represent broadly distributed species that belong to groups that have not yet been surveyed on Prince Edward Island
The Prince Edward Island Curculionidae were surveyed by Majka et al (2007), the Nitidulidae were surveyed by Majka and Cline (2006a), and the Maritime Provinces Aleocharinae by Majka and Klimaszewski (2010) so the new records of Trypodendron retusum (LeConte), Xyloborinus alni (Niisima), Cryptarcha ampla Erichson and Silusa californica Bernhauer are additions to a fauna which has already received recent attention
Summary
The collection of maple sap for the production of maple sugar has a long history in North America. Before the arrival of European settlers, native people in northeastern North America collected maple sap, pouring it into hollowed-out logs in which heatedCopyright C.G. Majka. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Christopher G. Majka / ZooKeys 51: 73–83 (2010)
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