How the suite fits together

How the five Apiary products connect, which ports they use, and how a memory travels through them. Written for anyone who wants the system view.

Related:

• What is the Apiary?
• Install the Apiary
• Glossary

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#The shape of the stack

The Apiary runs several small services on your own machine, each with one job. One portal shows all of them, one watchdog keeps all of them alive, and when the stack outgrows a single machine, a cloud orchestrator sees and steers the fleet without ever reading what the memory holds.

#Who does what

Product	Role	Address
Honeycomb	The memory daemon. Captures, distills, and recalls.	127.0.0.1:3850
Doctor	The watchdog. Probes, heals, and serves the status page.	127.0.0.1:3852
Hive	The portal. Serves the whole dashboard from one origin.	127.0.0.1:3853
Nectar	The codebase understanding daemon. Describes files and serves recall.	127.0.0.1:3854
Queen	The cloud control plane for a multi-machine fleet.	cloud

Honeycomb also runs an embeddings helper on 127.0.0.1:3851, which it supervises itself.

#How a memory travels

1. You work in your assistant as usual. Honeycomb quietly records the important moments.
2. Honeycomb distills those into clean notes at three levels of detail: a one-line key, a summary, and the full session.
3. Nectar, in the background, keeps a plain-language map of your codebase, so notes and code can be found by meaning.
4. At the start of your next session, Honeycomb hands the assistant a short briefing of what it already knows.
5. Hive shows you all of it in one dashboard. Doctor keeps the whole thing running and feeds Hive one live health signal.
6. If your team grows past one machine, Queen gives an admin the fleet view and the controls, without ever reading the memory itself.

#How they talk to each other

The assistants talk to a local helper, never to your data directly. Your browser talks only to Hive, and Hive reaches the other services over local loopback on your behalf, so no service needs to expose a port to your browser. Doctor watches each service's health and is the single source of the health picture that Hive renders. Nectar's recall folds into Honeycomb's shared memory, so your assistant benefits without a separate search box.

#The two planes

Everyday work rides the data plane: your memory and skills, in a store you own. Queen is a separate control plane that carries only coordination, liveness, identity, signed commands, and coarse usage facts. The two never collapse into one, which is why Queen can coordinate a fleet without ever reading your memory.

#What you never have to do

Run a database, write SQL, host a server before you can start, juggle ports, or hand your data to a vendor.

#Next steps

• Get it running in Install the Apiary.
• Read each product's own overview from the suite index.