This story is several years old and is about a family in Union County IL who try to be self sufficient. The Benson family has a small farm with a woodlot that is growing a reasonable amount of sugar maples.
Early Spring with its increasing hours of daylight brings a sap rise in the trees that can be extracted and boiled down to maple syrup. With just a little effort the family could make a lot of sugar for the year. We have all seen pictures of sugar bushes with buckets hanging from the trees and read annual newspaper articles about syrup production. It's almost iconic.
The Benson's use a traditional syrup collection method and hang buckets on the trees to collect the sap, but one Spring morning in 2012 they found their house surrounded by a police SWAT team who was there because someone had told them the sap buckets were indicative of a meth lab.
Fortunately the police had both common sense and a sweet tooth and the Benson's gave each of the officers a sample of their product. But I wonder what level of paranoia it takes to call a bucket hanging on a tree a meth lab?
