Pine sap...

What can be done with sap from pine trees. When I was up in canoe-camping in Canada over the summer, I came upon many pine trees with bulges of sap coming out of them. I'm curious what I could have done with it/used it for.

Pine or spruce gum are both good for cleaning your teeth, just chew it like regular gum(has kind of a fresh piney taste lol, pretty pungent) It's also good for a toothache if you just kind of keep a ball of it against the sore tootch. Pine gum is good for patching tent and canoe leaks, sealing a lodge if you build one out of bark, just warm it up ---it'll get more fluid---and spread it and let it harden. If your boots leak, same thing.

You could use it as glue and pitch for water proofing and I believe it is anti-viral, anti-fungal, and anti-bacterial. It also burns so you could probably find a use for that.

I believe if you cook it, you will get that black pitch Owl girl speaks of. I don't like it all that much, prefer epoxy to pitch.

Always seems to get everything sticky and it does not come off.

Here’s a site that talks about torches and he mentions ways of using pine pitch as fuel.
http://www.primitive.org/lighting.htm

I’ve only experimented with it as glue, I haven’t personally used it as anything ells.

I burned out a piece of tree branch to use as a cup and sealed it w/ pine pitch. Just cant use it for anything hot.

i have them here we use them for short hand glue thing you have to do is gather it and stir it with sugar makes a glue also if you make pine needle tea you can use the sap to bring them along with you and use it as a stirer

...oh crap, listen to me, I'm starting to post sounding like FVR!:rolleyes: Pine sap can also be used as a hot-burning fuel. Poke some holes into the sides of a regular tin can, and sap and use it as an emergency stove. I haven't tried it yet, myself though.:confused:

Goth, not trying to be negative here, but I'm not sure what you're talking about. If you heat up sugar, it'll pretty much turn into a "glue" by itself, though not a very good one. If you heat up pine sap, you're going to get that black mess that was described earlier. The adivice I offered for using it on your teeth, btw, you just scrape it off the tree and use raw. It'll work.

I sure wouldn't put the sap in any tea, you'll wind up drinking pine syrup :eek:
If any of you has ever seen a real old fashioned birch bark canoe and notice the blackened seams, that's pine tar. Indians used it because it made a better sealant than the sap of the birch. Birch sap makes a passable syrup by the way, not as sweet as maple but not bad.

By the way, another use that I forgot yesterday. If you boil pine sap with any kind of fat and mix in ashes from a pine fire, you've got a really good bar of soap. Want the exact quantities? Experiment, that's what I did, lol.