How Alpha made sap bombs on The Walking Dead

Alpha didn’t just bring an army of the undead with her when she attacked the Hilltop, she also brought some ingenious weapons.

In the opening scenes of The Walking Dead 1011 Beta is seen hacking into a tree to release the sap under the bark and collecting that sap in a container that is actually a walker bladder. As the shot widens viewers can see that Beta and some of the other Whisperers are in a pine forest and a large number of trees have containers nailed to them and are collecting sap.

Later on, after the Whisperers begin the assault on the Hilltop the Whisperers cleverly use intestines as robes to catapult the bags of sap at the survivors and at the fence behind them. The survivors, who are busy fighting the horde, get soaked in sap and one mentions that it smells like a Christmas tree.

That’s because it’s pine sap. Pine sap is flammable and is often used to start fires. By soaking the survivors and the fence behind them in pine sap Alpha was lacing them all with accelerant so that when she ordered her followers to shoot flaming arrows at them the arrows would kill the survivors in a particularly horrible way and set the main fence of Hilltop on fire.

Alpha’s horde is already a powerful weapon, but it looks like Alpha is stacking the deck and relying on some cunning weapons made from materials all around them to make sure that the Hilltop falls for good.

Other Uses For  Pine Sap

There are several very useful ways that flammable fir sap can come in handy for anyone living in a post-disaster or post-apocalypse situation. Pine trees are easy to find and sap is a renewable resource that can be used to make lots of things.

Lamps

Fill a container with sap and insert a scrap of sloth as a wick. Light the wick and the container will function like an oil lamp providing light and a bit of warmth. If you have an oil lamp but no oil pine sap can be used instead of oil.

Matches

To make matches you will need to make pine pitch, which is made by carefully heating the sap so that it doesn’t catch fire and adding ash and other filler to make a thick sticky liquid. Pine pitch can be used to make long burning matches, fire starting sticks, and torches.

Salve

Pine sap has antimicrobial and other healing properties so it can be used to keep cuts and scrapes clean. It can also be used to close wounds.

With so many uses pine sap is a very versatile resource for the survivors on The Walking Dead, but as Alpha demonstrated it can also be used as a powerful weapon.