Couple's hobby: Go with the flow

By BOB JACKSON
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
SALEM -- Dave Hively just loves it when the temperature gets cold enough to freeze his trees at night and just warm enough to thaw them in the daytime.
He's in no hurry for a stretch of balmy weather that will cause the trees to become freckled with tiny green buds. The longer the cold spell lasts, the better it is for him.
"Perfect weather," he says, pulling his fingers through his long, gray beard.
Hively and his wife, Nancy, make maple syrup at their home on West Middletown Road in Green Township, and he says this is prime time to harvest sap for the delicious topping.
"Once the trees have budded, it's no good," said Hively, walking through the 12-acre grove of sugar maples from which he draws the sap for his finished product. Sap from budded trees loses it natural sweetness and turns bitter, Mrs. Hively said.
Already started: This year, the sap started flowing Feb. 7, and the couple has made more than 100 gallons of syrup so far. That's what they made during the entire season last year because the weather turned warm too fast.
Making syrup is a passionate hobby for Hively, an electrician at the General Electric plant in Austintown, where he's worked 30 years.
It's a demanding process that often involves working from early morning to late at night. It can go on for days or weeks, depending on the weather, he said.
"Why do I keep doing it? I guess it's just like being a dairy farmer. You do it if it's in your blood," Hively said. It's in his blood because his father and his grandfather did it, he said.
He and Nancy started in 1984 with standard taps, using buckets to catch the sap and boiling it in their basement.
Today: Now, the maple grove is lined with an elaborate maze of rubber tubes that connect from 600 taps in the trees to bigger lines carrying sap to large holding tanks.
In the sugar house, Hively chucks log after log into a furnace, which provides heat to evaporate water from the sap. Sweat rolls down his face from the heat each time he opens the door to stoke the fire.
The evaporator boils about 140 gallons of sap per hour, Hively said. Since sap is mostly water, it takes about 43 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, he said.
Maple syrup producers must follow strict regulations to keep their equipment clean and prevent bacteria from settling in the lines, he said. If bacteria is found, all the lines must be flushed with water and cleaned thoroughly.
Top-quality syrup, or Grade A, sells for about $33 to $35 a gallon, while Grade B brings only about $15 a gallon. Grade B is darker and has a more robust flavor, but is not as desirable on the market as the lighter, more mellow Grade A, Hively said.
Flavor: "Light [syrup] looks pretty, but if you're talking about flavor, I don't like the light stuff," Mrs. Hively said. "I like the medium."
Even if syrup is made from sap that passes through bacteria-filled lines, it isn't a health hazard, because the sap is boiled during processing, the Hivelys said. But bacteria makes the sap darker, which drives down the price of the final product.
Producers also are not allowed to add sugar to enhance the syrup's sweetness. Getting caught could mean being shut down, he said.
After he retires, Hively said, he'll buy more trees and make the operation bigger. He's had offers from friends to move to Florida, but said he's not interested.
"When they have maple trees in Miami, I'll move there," he said.
XThe Hivelys bottle their syrup and sell nearly all of it to White House Fruit Farm on U.S. Route 62 in Green Township.