Honey Bee and Clethra My wife and I went for an afternoon hike to the Avalonia Land Conservancy's Donald Henne preserve, and though we saw the usual abundance of exciting things, from adolescent Great Blue Herons to, of course, gorgeous Spread-winged Damselflies, one discovery, once hardly worth a second look, caught my eye. Ordinary honeybees (Apis mellifera) used to be the common, everyday pollinators of such gorgeous flowers as Sweet Pepperbush (Clethra alnifolia) and all other blossoms, both wild and cultivated. But honeybees have suffered monumental population declines, the result of everything from invasive mites and mis-applied pesticides to habitat destruction and, most recently, colony collapse disorder. While bumblebees have picked up a lot of the pollination slack, I've missed seeing honeybees, which have become rare enough that spotting one was cause for a picture... and a celebration.