🍯 Vendor & Supplier Relationships Lab

About this simulation

A beekeeping business depends on outside vendors for three streams it cannot fully produce itself: mated queens, hive equipment (boxes, frames, extractors) and consumables (feed, medications, foundation). Each stream is drawn here as a shipping lane running from a supplier node into the operation's central warehouse, with glowing packets travelling along the lane whenever an order ships successfully.

How it works

• Every lane periodically places an order sized by the lead time. Whether that order actually arrives is a dice roll set by supplier reliability — unreliable vendors let packets vanish mid-flight (a missed or damaged shipment).
• The warehouse silos for each category drain continuously at a rate set by order / demand rate — this is colony growth, sales and seasonal use eating into stock.
• Turning on dual-source backup vendors adds a second, independently-rolled supplier per category. A shipment only fails to arrive if both the primary and the backup fail in the same cycle, which is why diversifying vendors is a core resilience strategy.
• If a silo empties, the warehouse flashes red and a stockout is logged — representing a real operational failure such as being unable to requeen a failing colony in time.

Controls

• Supplier reliability — probability (20–98%) that a given vendor's shipment ships on time and intact.
• Order lead time — days (1–14) between placing an order and its scheduled arrival; also sets how often orders are placed.
• Order / demand rate — how fast stock is consumed by the operation (10–90%).
• Dual-source backup vendors — toggle a second supplier per category on or off.
• ↺ Reset — restores default values and clears the stockpiles. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

Many commercial beekeepers pre-order queens from breeders 6–12 months ahead of the season and still keep a second breeder on file — because a single bad weather week at one queen yard can wipe out a spring requeening plan overnight.