Mairéad Ronan

And I wonder what the future holds for Cara Darmody.

But right now, on this Friday, we wish her well in the rest of the Junior Cert.

That's good news.

The other sort of ish good news is that bumblebees are intelligent.

Well, they're more intelligent than we thought.

Imagine the size of a bumblebee's brain.

And most people, and I would be one of them, would think that insects are reflex-based machines, that they just, you know, they're sort of programmed, you know, and they do the thing and the honeybees and do that and then they die.

That's it.

Anyway, they've done research.

And there's this 100-year-old research.

They first did it on chimpanzees.

And they gave them the wherewithal to get a banana that was out of reach.

So they put them in a situation, these chimpanzees, 100 years ago, with a number of boxes and a banana that was up there.

And eventually the chimpanzees worked out that if they stacked the boxes on top of each other, they could get to the banana and they could feed themselves.

And that was all good.

And they've done it with a number of other animals, not the banana and the boxes, but variations on a theme.

So they've done it with elephants and crows.

And now they've done it with bees.

So firstly, they train the bees to access an artificial flower.

So if they touch on an artificial flower, they get a little sip of sugared water.