Hive #1 frames salvaged

Yesterday and today I went into hives #2 & 3.  I also opened #1 and selected frames with honey, nectar or pollen.  I placed one of those frames into each brood box of #2 & 3.   There were some drones hatching on one of the frames I removed from #3.
There were still a fair number of bees in #1.
The girls had done a good job of cleaning the stickies that I put on earlier this month and they had already started filling the comb with nectar.

You can see the sun reflecting off the nectar.  This had been one of the stickies in #3.  I left the super on, so #3 now has two supers.
There were a LOT of drones in both hives.  The picture below is from a super frame in #3.

Can you see all the drones?  If not, I marked all the ones I could find.

Perhaps one of you compulsive types can figure the percentage of drones.
There were a few frames with a good brood pattern in #2 bottom box.  I did not see, nor search carefully for the queen.
We did get nearly 2 gallons of honey.  The bees cleaned the extractor for us.

Last week I saw several small bees hanging onto an asparagus berry.  All but one had left when I got back with my camera. I am sure one of you wants to identify the species for all of us.

Honey from #1

I extracted the honey from the #1 supers.  I do not yet know how much there is but it looks like a couple of gallons.  I put the stickies onto #2 and 3.  I looked into #1.  There were still a fair number of bees but it looks like close to 1/3 are drones.  There were only about 1/2 dozen scattered capped drone cells.  The girls are still making honey and there are a couple of frames full.  I need to figure when it would be best to transfer the honey and pollen into the other hives.

Laying workers in #1

Well, hive number one is on its way out.  I went in yesterday and had to accept the bad news.  I saw no queen or worker brood.  There was scattered drone brood much of it in worker-sized cells.  I looked for eggs to be 100% certain but could not see any.  I did not take any pictures, but this is a good picture similar to what I saw in my hive.
I looked in one of my beekeeping books about what to do.  If this happens early in the spring one can try to re-queen in a number of ways, but it is too late in the year for that.  Franklin Carrier says in his "Keeping Bees" that one can combine the queenless hive with one of the strong hives.  I would like to do that, but we are going to Massachusetts tomorrow and I won't be around to perform the necessary steps.  I emailed Kathy Niven last night and she concurs that it is too late in the year to do anything and she does not recommend combining.
#1 had been my strongest hive, so I'm sad to see it go.  At least its old queen lives on in #3 (remember I made a split) and she's doing well.
Today I put the escape board below the two supers and tomorrow, before leaving for the airport, I'll put the supers with all their honey in  the garage.