Maple syrup sweetens life for producers

This season's $60 a gallon (about 3.78 liters) price tag on maple syrup makes for one expensive pancake breakfast, but it's a windfall for those who coax it out of trees.

A surge in the price of maple syrup has brought new opportunity to thousands of small, mostly family-run businesses in the United States and Canada that produce the sweet, aromatic treat.

For the past decade, rising energy prices had put a squeeze on syrup makers, who spend frigid late-winter evenings in steamy huts boiling the watery maple sap to make the thick, amber syrup that sweetens breakfasts around the world. Sugarers burn oil or wood to boil the sap and the prices of both fuels have risen sharply over the past few years.