a Mr Borst snip...
In fact, here is an example. In the 1960s producers anticipated losses and the need to refresh their operations annually. 

This is from the ABJ, in 1969

my comments....
as I have written before... a bit later (early 1980) during one of my tours of duty with a commercial beekeeper we did just about what the short article describes.  at the northern end of the line (North Dakota) in the fall of the year we killed off about 2/3 of the hives there and move about 800 hives south.  we did try to identify the youngest and most robust queens to move south and basically we then stripped honey from all the hives we killed and used this as the first feed for the splits we would bring back the next spring.  at that location the timing of bring strong growing hives back north was critical to whether we did or did not produce a crop at that end of the line.  spring time splitting and feeding was a pretty labor intensive time of the year and on some of the more robust hives we could even shake a few packages which the operator sold.

as far as I know that producer had been doing this for at least 25 years prior to when I worked for him and about the only variation in this model was the size and power of trucks that moved the hives north and south and of course early on the loading was by hand and later with the use of skid loaders and bees on pallets.

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