Great question Jack, but to some degree you can throw some of those rules out the window when fishing ponds. This is different than fishing high pressure lakes. My experience is bass will hit a top-water on a pond year round. Some days better than others, but year round. I have caught bass on buzz-baits at 5 pm in the fall on a cloudy day. As Steve Kennedy once told me: “fish are strange”. Keep throwin em! 

By design bass are lazy. Thus they are opportunistic feeders. They are ambush feeders, which is why you often catch them on points, channels, drop offs, brush, rocks and trees. They are hidden in these elements waiting for an easy meal to swim by. As water temperatures dips below about 60 to 65 degrees their metabolism slows down and thus their need to feed; much less having to chase a meal. None of this means you cannot catch bass on top water baits in the late fall or winter, however, I would expect slower moving top water baits to be a bit more effective than top water baits like a buzz bait or ripping a frog quickly. As a general rule winter time is a great time to fish extra slow; realizing that you will probably not have a day where you catch 50 fish. But days where you can find a handful of fish; hopefully some big fish that did want to feed while their metabolism is slowed.
This is not necessarily related to your question, but interesting trivia about bass. It takes 10 lbs of forage to put 1 lb of weight on a bass. See why I do not want our members to remove bluegill from our club lakes. In most cases it takes dozens or even hundreds bluegill to add one pound of weight to a bass.

Thanks guys.  Very informative and helpful.  I am planning on trying some topwaters this weekend.

I love topwater fishing too. I’ll fish them sometimes even when it doesn’t make sense to do so, like hot sunny days or cold days. The biggest factor I’ve learned is that when the sun gets on the water (after sunrise) the topwater bite slows down until later afternoon near sundown. So I’ll fish the eastern shores in morning (to stay out of the sun longer) then fish the western shore at evening. But as Jon mentioned, these small lakes with no fishing pressure can be topwater producers at any time. Cloudy or windy days are tops for top waters! So give them a try for 30 minutes or so and you will know for sure!

Topwaters were hot this weekend at Marshall!  My buddy and I boated right at 60 fish, half of which were in the 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 range with the largest @ 5lbs.  Fished slow and tight to the timber.