The confluence of computers, communications, and databases is quickly creat
ing a distributed database where many applications require real-time access
to both temporally accurate and multimedia data. This is particularly true
in military and intelligence applications, but these required features are
needed in many commercial applications as well. We are developing a distri
buted database, called BeeHive, which could offer features along different
types of requirements: real-time, fault-tolerance, security, and quality-of
service for audio and video. Support of these features and potential trade
-offs between them could provide a significant improvement in performance a
nd functionality over current distributed database and object management sy
stems. In this paper, we present a high level design for BeeHive architectu
re and sketch the design of the BeeHive Object Model (BOM) which extends ob
ject-oriented data models by incorporating time and other features into obj
ects, resulting in a highly reflective architecture.