Hive / Bees / Pollen

Several bees, one scheduler

One full cycle runs eight phases: buffer, dispatch, transit, acquire, transfer, return, swap, ingest. Below, two bees run those phases against two machines at once, routed by the Hive scheduler. The rail tracks the phase the highlighted bee is in right now. The hardware moves the data; the scheduler decides.

Three rules the design never breaks

Drone vendors will change over the life of the site. These three rules never do.

The parts change. The Hive doesn't.

The scheduler is the product on top

The scheduler decides which bee goes where, and when. It watches every machine's buffer, every bee's battery, and every blossom's health, and plans pickups all day, like a delivery route that never stops updating. Drones come and go over the years. The scheduler and its data stay.

The building the data lands in

The Hive is a shipping container that goes in before the first flight. One end is the equipment room: the carrier handoff, a 100 Gbps switch, the Pollen ingest shelf, an edge computer, and a UPS, all in one 42U rack. The other end is a working site office with four desks. The ingest bay is a slot in the wall, so cartridge swaps never go through the office.

The drawing reads left to right the same way the data moves: bees drop Pollen in the wall bay, the cartridges plug into the rack and become the storage, the rack hands the traffic to the demarc, and the private line carries it to the two far ends. The amber path is the same color as the beam in the animations on purpose. It is the same data, still moving, on glass now instead of air.

WIRELESS FIBER - A FIBER PATCH CORD MADE OF LIGHT

Wireless fiber is a data link made of light. The same small lasers used inside datacenters send 10 to 100 Gbps through open air, both directions at once. It ends wherever the data is, not wherever you managed to dig a trench.

The honest downsides: it needs a clear line of sight, and lenses hate dirt and rain. The 15-foot gap is short enough that weather barely matters, the lid keeps the lens covered except during a pickup, and the machine buffers hold days of data for when the bees can't fly.

Why the numbers work

The 50° cone gives the drone a 7-foot circle to hover in. Modern drones hold position about ten times tighter than that, so hitting it is easy. Each machine makes a terabyte an hour. A bee visits every five or six hours, picks up about 5 TB, and one bee can cover six or seven busy machines. At the Hive, the docked cartridges are the storage itself, and the 100 Gbps line carries everything to the GPU cluster with room to spare. Nothing is erased until the far end confirms. The 100 Gbps head fits in the same cartridge and empties a full shift in 13 minutes.

Bees make roughly 5 TB pickups, each flying at its own altitude so they never cross paths. At full size, six pads and six bees cover about 40 busy machines making around 640 TB a day, and the 100 Gbps line still carries all of it. Extra slots on a machine cover bad weather. Extra slots on the shelf cover an internet outage. Extra pads cover a broken drone. Every backup on site is the same thing: a spare slot.

How many bees?

Set your site below. The calculator works out drones, pads, cartridges, Hives, and the yearly cost against doing it by hand. The number people always guess wrong: drones per machine is a fraction.

What manual handling really costs

The alternative to bees is people: a tech drives to each machine, stops it, swaps the drive, and either carries it back or mails it. Set your labor numbers below. The result is usually a surprise, and the surprise is not the wages. It is the stoppages.