How do you address the pyramiding technique that so many on this thread have found so successful?
Remember, in nature, once the bees move into a cavity and start building comb from the top of the cavity down, it is rare that there will all of a sudden be extra space added to the cavity above the already established comb. Adding space (drawn comb, foundation, foundationless) _above_ the established colony is trick....exploiting their natural behavior by introducing an unnatural circumstance...room above.
From the bee's perspective, the cavity should be filled from the top down, so room up top requires filling in with comb, stores, and brood. The bees are likely to not abandon the cluster to build this comb, so bottoms up....it starts to flop over, so the bees build brace comb at 90degrees...and you have a mess.
I'm not a fan of alternating the foundationless with foundation or drawn comb....I think the bees work best when they can make a contiguous cluster and work on several parallel combs at once.
The bees really like to be _between_ combs, not on them...so I try to take the middle 3 frames from the box below and move them up to the center of the new box. I push the remaining brood combs together and put the 3 foundationless frames in the lower box, on the outside.
deknow