Hive

Arup’s Insect Hotel – Core77

Arup Associates have just won the Beyond the Hive Competition, sponsored by the City of London, to design a Bug Hotel for its parks. This one encourages the presence of stag beetles, solitary bees, butterflies, moths, spiders, lacewings and ladybirds by combining all these species’ required environments into one.

The ‘hotel’ consists of a vertical wall with cells divided into a voronoi pattern, where detritus and materials can be stuffed to creaqte the perfect environments for a wide variety of insects. The sides of the hotel are accessible to moths, and the top can absorb rain water through planting.

via Arup’s Insect Hotel – Core77.

Anthill: how biologist EO Wilson turned science into best-selling fiction | The Observer

That lifetime has mostly involved the comprehensive study of a particular world that first intrigued him way back when: the world of ants. Much of what we know about social insects and the “superorganism” of the hive and nest has been a result of Wilson’s research and observation. Over six decades and 20 books he has detailed every aspect of ant societies: how they divide labour and spread knowledge, how they mate and fight, live and die. Wilson has used this wisdom – “sociobiology” – to make arguments about genetics and conditioning that have applications thoughout the living world, and which extend to our understanding of human nature and society. Much of that wisdom he has now brought to bear on Anthill, his debut novel, which has at its heart an extraordinary ant's eye view of the world, a social realist book-within-a-book of the rise and fall of a particular ant colony.

via Anthill: how biologist EO Wilson turned science into best-selling fiction | Science | The Observer.