  The upcoming Wide-Field Upgrade (WFU) has ushered in a new era of
instrumentation for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET). Here, we present the
design, construction progress, and lab tests completed to date of the
blue-optimized second generation Low Resolution Spectrograph (LRS2-B). LRS2-B
is a dual-channel, fiber fed instrument that is based on the design of the
Visible Integral Field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS), which is the new
flagship instrument for carrying out the HET Dark Energy eXperiment (HETDEX).
LRS2-B utilizes a microlens-coupled integral field unit (IFU) that covers a
7"x12" area on the sky having unity fill-factor with ~300 spatial elements that
subsample the median HET image quality. The fiber feed assembly includes an
optimized dichroic beam splitter that allows LRS2-B to simultaneously observe
370 nm to 470 nm and 460 nm to 700 nm at fixed resolving powers of R \approx
1900 and 1200, respectively. We discuss the departures from the nominal VIRUS
design, which includes the IFU, fiber feed, camera correcting optics, and
volume phase holographic grisms. Additionally, the motivation for the selection
of the wavelength coverage and spectral resolution of the two channels is
briefly discussed. One such motivation is the follow-up study of spectrally and
(or) spatially resolved Lyman-alpha emission from z ~ 2.5 star-forming galaxies
in the HETDEX survey. LRS2-B is planned to be a commissioning instrument for
the HET WFU and should be on-sky during quarter 4 of 2013. Finally, we mention
the current state of LRS2-R, the red optimized sister instrument of LRS2-B.
