In the old days the sap was hauled to the sugar house by human, horse, ox, and tractor power. Today most of it gets to the sugar house via plastic pipelines. This keeps the sap far cleaner and protected from bacteria better. I know this first hand as I worked in the neighbor's sugarbush and sugar house when I was a kid. The biggest tree we tapped held 13 buckets, and was over 5 feet in diameter.
Some folks think the sap just comes out of the trees and is packaged as syrup for sale.
It takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. Even more is required to make maple sugar. The water content of the sap has to be boiled off, leaving the syrup behind. The sooner you boil the sap, the better the quality of the syrup. If you wait too long, the sap will spoil and you'll have to dump it.