Just this morning, she took an order for a gift box to be sent to Arkansas. In it, neatly bedded in brown confetti, Doris has arranged a beeswax candle, a jar of Raspberry honey and one tiny jar of Maple Blossom, a rare commodity these days.

Two years ago, the maple trees along Cedar River bloomed extravagantly, and the Mech’s bees ventured out at the first warmth of spring, zooming along the valley floor to bring back the nectar that is the start of Maple Blossom honey, a dark, pungent honey that tastes a little of licorice. Doris’s customers at Pike Place have come to ask for it specifically. She gives them recipes for Maple Honey Glaze—“It’s wonderful on salmon,” she says.

But the next year, there was too much rain, and the maple trees didn’t bloom. The bees stayed in, hovering around the hives, waiting to be taken where flowers were blooming. Finally, in early June, as dusk was falling and the bees settled into their hives for the night, Doris and Don loaded them onto their flatbed Chevy and drove the hives to Hartstine Island, their first stop for the summer. The huckleberries were about to bloom. A few weeks later, the bees came back home to Maple Valley for a change of hive and a good night’s sleep, then out again with clean frames, this time to the strawberry clover in the Kittitas Valley. By fall, the bees traveled to Mt. Rainier for fireweed nectar, the banks of the Yakima River for snowberry flowers and thistle, and finally, back to winter in Maple Valley.

Doris is almost out of honey from the last Maple Blossom harvest—only tiny jars are left, and not many of those. It’s almost April—almost time for the maple trees to bloom. Doris is keeping her fingers crossed, but in the meantime, she’s removed the Maple Blossom honey from her main list, and pulled it from the neighborhood markets.

In the early 1980s, Mech Apiaries honey was on the shelves at major grocery chains in the northwest, but the demands of big business were more than the Mech’s could – or wanted to – handle. The stores wanted more honey. They wanted bar codes. They wanted Doris to bring her product to the distribution center almost 200 miles away. Big business was not the way to go. After a few years of struggling to keep up, they stopped supplying the big stores and focused on Pike Place Market, where Doris has found her niche.

Standing behind the table, smiling sweetly, she tailors her pitch depending to each customer. An older man in overalls stops by and fingers some beeswax chips that she’s put out in a basket. “It’s useful, that beeswax,” she says. “You can use it for waxing tools, it’s wonderful for wood screws.” Without looking up, the man rubs a chip with his thumb. “In the olden days,” he says, “people used to make candles out of this stuff.” Doris brightens. “Oh yes!” She points to a row of candles on the honeycomb-shaped shelves. “That’s what I did.” The man admires a duck-shaped yellow candle and buys a couple of wax chips.

She hasn’t been in a classroom for three decades, but you’d never know it. A young woman in a University of Washington sweatshirt stops for a taste test. Doris offers her a stick with a drop of Summer Meadow, then one with Snowberry, then one with Wildflower. Then, it’s quiz time. “If you were going to make gingerbread, which one would you use?” Doris leans forward, eyebrows raised, waiting for an answer. “Um, the darker one?” The young woman answers tentatively. “Me too!” Doris cheers. “What about salad dressing?” The young woman lingers at Doris’s table, tasting honeys and chatting. She buys two jars—Blackberry and Wildflower packed in plastic for travel.