The bee’s helping hand:

Now and again a bee flies into or out of the hive and lands ungracefully upside down. She will twist and struggle and usually right herself. But sometimes it looks as if this is not going to happen. Twice I have seen a bee continue to struggle until it seemed that she was just not getting up. And both times bees continued to fly in and out of the hive totally ignoring their beached hive mate until – until some bee coming in or going out paused long enough to grab hold of the struggling bee and help her right itself. Took only a fraction of a second – hardly enough to interrupt the helper bee’s flight path.

Drones:

Soon after I got my hive there were a number of drones hanging out on the hive’s “front porch” in the late afternoons each day. An experienced beekeeper said the presence of so many drones (maybe one of a hundred of the bees present) meant the hive was ready to swarm. They would hang out and sometimes take off and come back quickly—likely for a “cleansing flight” to defecate, since bees evidently won’t do this in the hive.
But now I rarely see a drone. I don’t know where they went-- my bee friend says they may have swarmed already and I didn’t see it (I was gone for a few days), but the hive doesn’t seem depopulated. In fact, it is clipping along at quite a pace. I just put my fourth “Western” super on, at the point when the third was beginning to be built out in 6 of 8 frames (this was the addition point suggested by another experienced beekeeper.