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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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bees

July 23, 2021 by Dave Bonta

A large native bee lands on a porch column to groom her antennae. A black ant races back and forth brandishing a dead ant like a flag.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags ants, bees
September 15, 2017 by Dave Bonta

The corpse of a bee hangs six feet above the garden, swaddled in webbing. Inside its fence, the amelanchier sprout is starting to redden.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags bees, shadbush, spiderwebs 1 Comment
August 29, 2014 by Dave Bonta

In the shadows of the trees, the grass bent low by dew. From the sunlit meadow, the drone of cold-hardy bumblebees servicing the goldenrod.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags bees, bumblebees, dew, goldenrod 1 Comment
August 24, 2014 by Dave Bonta

A large spider rappels sideways across the yard on an invisible thread, while a bee struggles to maintain its balance on the porch rail.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags bees, spiders 1 Comment
April 28, 2014 by Dave Bonta

On the myrtle flowers, nothing but native bees. The sun fades. A black-throated green warbler calls, switching between its two buzzy songs.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags bees, black-throated green warbler, myrtle

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On This Day

  • September 15, 2025
    There’s more yellow than ever in the woods’ edge trees, in the spicebushes, in the meadows filled with goldenrod, and now the sun—the opposite of mellow among the yellow leaves of a black birch.
  • September 15, 2024
    Quiet and cool. A hummingbird hovers over the bright pink cover of my book: Phantom Pain Wings by Kim Hyesoon.
  • September 15, 2023
    43F/6C an hour after sunrise. Not a cloud in the sky. Black walnuts crash down at random intervals.
  • September 15, 2022
    A high cloud ceiling full of holes. In the meadow, one snakeroot flower nods: hummingbird.
  • September 15, 2021
    Dawn is its own thing—not just a transition, I think, as fog forms and grows. When it lifts, the no-longer-dark meadow glows goldenrod-yellow.

See all...

Related book

Cover of Ice Mountain with a linocut of a big ridgetop tree.

What I do after I sit on the porch. One winter and spring's daily walks distilled into short poems with linocut illustrations by Beth Adams.

Header image: detail from Paper Garden by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (used by permission)

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