Today has been absolutely beautiful with warm sunshine and clear skies. We have been watching the bees visit all the different flowers in our garden, they seem to especially like the rose pictured above.
We discovered some cuckoo spit on another rose bush. December and June thought it was really disgusting, until I explained that cuckoo spit is actually made by a small bug called a froghopper, also known as a spittlebug, when it is young to protect itself from predators, such as birds. They make the foam by excreting the sap of the plant they are feeding on and mixing it with air to create the bubbles.
I believe it has got the name of cuckoo spit because the bugs and their foam usually appear on shrubs and bushes around the same time of year as cuckoos return from their migration to Africa.
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