Curious done behavior (at least to me)

[Occam]

I walked out to the garden and beehives this evening. On my double deep I noticed some interesting behavior I haven't seen before (see picture below). I'm used to seeing bearding although right now is early for it and I haven't seen any in earnest yet. These drones had clustered together under the inset handle and a smaller group had clustered to the side of my entrance hole. The workers were wandering around and I saw a couple feeding a drone or two. There were also around 25 drones I found dead below and to the side of the hive. This is the first time I've noticed this particular behavior

Any thoughts? I'm interested to hear what input y'all have.

[Michael Bush]

Did you get a late frost or something that would cause a dearth?  Are there worker brood cells in the hive?  Certainly on a drone laying hive (either a drone laying queen or laying workers) sometimes there are so many drones that they would cluster like this.  In any dearth they will drive out the drones if it lasts long at all.

[Occam]

When I performed an inspection 2 weeks ago the queen was doing well, there was plenty of eggs and brood of all stages, not an unusual amount of drones either. There had been no queen cells and the hive hadn't swarmed, I still had a marked queen. I opened the brood nest for some expansion and moved a couple frames of brood to a weaker hive needing a bit of a boost (made sure queen wasn't on those frames). We haven't had any frost lately, it's been  probably close to a month. We've had a lot of rain but nothing that would cause a dearth that I'm aware of.

I've been planning on making a cut-down split of this hive if they're still doing well this weekend and giving the split (once I know everything is successful) to my father in law since he's wanting to start keeping.

[BeeMaster2]

Sounds like the hive is ok. It might just bee that they are kicking the drones out.
Jim Altmiller

[Terri Yaki]

Poor guys, all they get is used and abused.

[Occam]

Sounds like the hive is ok. It might just bee that they are kicking the drones out.
Jim Altmiller

Hopefully so. Planning on splitting this evening if all looks good and I provided I get home early enough. Apparently people think I need to do a job and not hang out with my bees all day