Since comminicating with a series of in's and out's will take a lot of time (I estimate 3+ cycles per conversation?) it might be better to assign each command a bot might need to deal with to a particular in/out slot and value. Since this will mean multiple commands will be assigned to the same communication frequency, there should be a heirarchy of command importance. That is, the higher number command will overwrite the lower number command, but the lower level command will not overwrite the higher command. In addition to this, we want every drone that recieves the order to relay it to other drones. This can be done by copying the recieved value into it's own .out.
So, for example, a drone sees a conspec with 10 stored in in/out1. Suppose this is the hibernation command. It then copies that value into its own out1 and starts a 'countdown' until it goes to hibernate. It stops eating food, but it wanders around until that countdown expires so that other drones can see the command displayed.
When the keeper sees a drone that has not recieved a necessary message (which it can tell, based on the value it displays), it will approach and fire an info shot forcing the drone to look at the keeper. The drone then put's the keeper's command on display so that other drones who happen to see it will do the same.
Since this system requires a heirarchal command system, one of the following should happen:
1. The commands continue to escalate until hibernation, during which time they are set to zero.
2. There is a command to change from using frequency 1 to frequency 2 or 5 or etc. These cycle around infrequently enough that there arent any 'loops' in communication.
3. Drones periodically return to the hive to have their frequency changed. The hive gives the wraith instructions on when to return again. This isnt good because it is slow.
I suppose there are other ways to make this work, but I haven't thought of them.