From her table at the Pike Place Market in Seattle, dressed in her “Let it Bee” sweatshirt, she sells tangy Rainier Fireweed honey, fruity Raspberry honey, dark, intense Maple Blossom honey and Huckleberry honey that tastes just slightly of butterscotch.

“Did you know that honey is named for the flowers that the bees visit?” she asks sweetly, pointing at the plastic-covered pictures that line the front of her table. Almost everyone asks Doris whether the honey is supposed to taste like raspberries or maple. Even if they don’t ask, she’ll usually volunteer it. “These are snowberry flowers, these are blackberries,” she says. “Each one has a distinct flavor—from the flowers. Would you like to taste some?”

Around her, the market is, to use her word, buzzing. Hmong flower growers make bouquets from the buckets of daffodils and tulips, visitors take pictures of sea bass and octopus flying through the air, farmers spray down colorful displays of carrots and peppers, Brussels sprouts and beets. It’s the first weekend of halibut season—and every rubber-clad fishmonger is hollering about halibut. They’ll sell you crab or mussels, King salmon, salmon jerky, salmon spread—but today, halibut is the star.

Like many of the other farmers and craftspeople that line the North Arcade wing of the market, Mech Apiaries is a one-family operation. Don, the manager, orchestrates production. Their daughter, Dina, draws illustrations of bees and flowers against an outline of Washington State for labels and flyers. Doris is the people-person, the one-woman honey education seminar, the sales force. And Pike Place Market, the carnival of local produce and Pacific Northwest foodstuffs that has been filling Seattle’s—and tourists’—grocery bags for almost 100 years, is Doris’s turf. She’s been here since 1974, selling honey, chatting with tourists, spreading the word about honey and beeswax, bee pollen and honeycomb.

It was thirty years ago that Don quit his engineering job at Boeing and Doris left hers as a high school home ec teacher, in search of the sweet life. They learned by doing. Their apiary was their back yard. Don was energized by his new project—it felt a lot better than designing weapons. He read books and visited seasoned beekeepers, learning their methods, watching them work. He built the stacks of boxes that would be home for his bees: a simple stand, bottom board, brood chambers, supers and frames.

Shrouded in netting, pants tucked into his boots, Don filled the hives with workers and queens and waited for honey. His engineer’s instinct saw him through designing his bee yards and setting up the system. He lined up the hives in a neat row, set up a code to identify the strong hives and the weak ones, calculated yields and sales projections.