This is the first time I’ve come across this idea of “fall comb buildout” on all the beekeeping forums I’ve watched since forums came into existence. And it gets me quite intrigued as it reminded me of 45 years ago when I first started beekeeping with 2 hives. I was into expansion mode and desperately trying to get my foundation combs built out for the next year. A commercial beekeeper said I could have all the bulk bees I wanted from one of his yards so I took a number of his powerful colonies and shook them into 2 stacks of foundation supers…queens and all. There was a field of volunteer canola nearby in bloom even though the season was over. We got a week or so of warm weather and they built out every comb perfectly…not a cell of drone comb. Later I reduced them to 2 boxes and wintered them on white comb…a no no in this part of the world. I don’t know how many queens per hive survived but they wintered perfectly…no pollen reserves…and produced a 200kg crop the next year. Of course I was too inexperienced to appreciate what I had actually accomplished.
So fall feeding using foundation can work just fine under the right conditions…but there has to be full boxes of bees. There is very little in the literature about “fall comb buildout”…thanks ABB for jogging that pleasant memory.