Before Aladin Borioli began work on Hives, he realised that there wasn’t much information out there on the history of beehives. There are a couple of reasons why, “but the two main ones”, he tells It’s Nice That, are simple enough. Firstly, “hives have always been built with quite fragile material – cow dung, straw, clay and wood – largely curtailing their longevity,” Aladin explains. Secondly, there isn’t much interest in the subject of beehives, by way of research and academia. Pouring over the small, honey-coloured publication Hives, published by RVB Books, it’s near impossible to imagine how this would be the case. Spanning the baffling timeline of Egypt, 2400 B.C.E. to 1852 C.E. – that’s 4,400 years for those not feeling up to doing quick maths today – Hives excavates centuries worth of extraordinary architectural beehive diversity, before hive construction became standardised with the introduction of the far blander box hive in 1852.