Sap activity, which transforms excess ingested sugar into long-chain oligosaccharides." A much larger set of animals do however consume phloem sap by proxy, either "through feeding on the honeydew of phloem-feeding hemipterans. Honeydew is physiologically less extreme than phloem sap, with a higher essential:non-essential amino acid ratio and lower osmotic pressure," or by feeding on the biomass of insects that have grown on more direct ingestion of phloem sap. Maple syrup is made from reduced sugar maple xylem sap. The sap often is harvested from the Sugar Maple, "Acer saccharum". In some countries (e.g., Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Belarus, Russia) harvesting
Sap century, there has been some controversy regarding the mechanism of xylem sap transport; today, most plant scientists agree that the cohesion-tension theory best explains this process, but multiforce theories that hypothesize several alternative mechanisms have been suggested, including longitudinal cellular and xylem osmotic pressure gradients, axial potential gradients in the vessels, and gel- and gas-bubble-supported interfacial gradients. Xylem sap transport can be disrupted by cavitation—an "abrupt phase change [of water] from liquid to vapor"—resulting in air-filled xylem conduits. In addition to being a fundamental physical limit on tree height, two environmental stresses can disrupt xylem transport by cavitation: "increasingly negative