Today is January 16th 2019 and I cam across a very interesting site while observing 4 parent hives today.  The weather has been in the 40's the last week or so with a spike of 65 today.  While looking underneath the entrances to the hives I noticed a large pile of large dead drones.  The odd part about this is that per traditional beekeeping rules, these drones should have been long gone months ago.  

So, my conclusion is that this was caused by two catalysts.  one, the weather had been too cold to remove dead bees from the hive and the warm weather allowed them to remove these bees from the hive.  And second, I have determines that the late nector flow (ending mid December) had allowed for resources to be plentiful enough to feed all (including drones) much later into the winter than traditionally expected.