There should be a fall Flow, but the bees are focused on putting up winter stores rather than expanding.
At this time of year we help by consolidating full frames into the winter configuration of two boxes, and keeping extra frames of honey for mid-winter or spring feeding.
What I have found with my hives is to observe and adjust my thinking to suit each hive, if the bees reject plastic frames but are working wax frames then adapt to them. Bees can be more stubborn than you so for the best results think flexible, unless the bees are making life hard for you.
The only foundation to stay away from is foundation out of China which is a mix of paraffin and bees wax, you will find it on EBay but not in an Apiarist Supplier, they donāt want to loose customers and get a bad reputation.
Regards
Not to mention you get those lovely faces with hardly any drones! My first year when I had a lot of foundationless- the bees drew them out beautifully- and I thought- this is easy! Then spring came on fully and I had huge patches of drone comb everywhere- which looks quite ugly and lumpy. Just the other day I inspected my mums hive: now most of the brood frames are foundation frames and they were perfect combs with a perfect worker brood pattern everywhere. Then there was one fondationless- and one entire half of one face was pure drone comb. Other than that it is a perfect frame though- nice and straight. Itās interesting though to see how fi they cells are big- you get large amounts of drones. I am not against a few drones but I do like that I can reduce the numbers somewhat using foundation.
At first I liked foundationless as seemed easy, natural and cheaper. But spending a few dollars on sheets of foundation really isnāt that much at all to easily set up a lovely brood box. I still plan to use foundationless a lot- especially in ideals for cut comb- but also interspersed in brood boxes.
When I catch swarms I often checkerboard the nucleus- two foundation and three foundationless. then when I move that to a larger hive I add three more foundation to end up with an 8 frame brood of 5 foundation and 3 foundationlessā¦
A vid showing how to handle the frames, foundationless and with foundation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Ul7864B1Y
I thank all of you so much. I will be uploading pictures in the next few days