Backyard Beekeeping Questions and Answers episode 225, when will robbing stop? Time to take honey?

Welcome to another episode of backyard beekeeping topics.
This is a fast-moving time of year when it comes to your backyard honey bee management.
Many of today's topics deal with honey removal and robbing issues.
Are ants eating your inner insulated inner cover? Let's stop that.
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These are the topics for today, listed in order:
1) Is 3 x 3/8" opening enough to protect from robbing? When should we take robbing screens off?
2) Australia now has varroa and is moving to a management plan. I just wanted to ask you what treatments you would recommend for our weather in Sydney?
This is a response I provided to another viewer regarding the drone cage method:
Once the drone comb is drawn out, the queen is inside the Queen Isolation Cage until she lays up the frame/cells.
Then the queen is released to the rest of the hive again while the nurse bees attend the drone larvae.
Once the drone comb is capped you can remove the frame and freeze it.
This post-freeze frame of drone pupae can be dissected and varroa can be counted.
Orrrr... the drones can be permitted to emerge from their cells and kept inside the cage until the bulk of them are between 1-3 days old, then remove the cage with the drone frame and drones from the hive. Permit the worker bees to leave the cage, and then you can CO2 the entire frame of drones and do physical mite counts, if they are mite-free you can release the drones. 5X magnification is more than enough to see mites on the abdomens of the drones.
Orrr... you can put the emerged drones still inside the cage, and put that cage into a nucleus hive by itself and treat with Oxalic Acid Vaporization in order to count mites. OAV is most effective when all caps are off. Do not remove the cage/frame until they are all uncapped. If they are mite-free, you can release the drones as they will need to be fed by workers in order to survive.
3) If I put pollen patties on my hive, are the nurse bees or foragers retrieving the resources? Am I limiting the number of foragers that leave the hive because they are foraging inside the box?
4) I think I finally have the red ants under control. I don't think my hives will make it through winter and want to combine them but don't want to lose a queen. Can I put an inner cover with the round hole between them and combine the hives?
5) Do the yellow jackets get varroa mites as the honey bees?
This video shows what may be DWV in wasps:
• Large Yellow Jacket Wa...
6) In this video, you can see a drone land on he board in the left of the frame, then crawl into the hive. What's that all about? Do drones swarm with hives?
7) The rapid rounds don't sit flush on the inner cover due to the protrusion of the center. I've seen you use a spacer. How did your project work out?
• Insulated Inner Cover ... insulated cover modification.
8) Can I leave extracted frames/comb in the hive? I want to put the now empty comb into the other end of the Layens hive. Is it ok to leave comb in the hive?
9) I have read that I can re-feed the honey to the colony by putting a standard inner cover between the super and the brood chamber because the colony will not consider the comb on the other side to be part of the colony. I was wondering if you had any opinions about the approach?
10) There are a lot of people on UA-cam talking about feeding bananas to bees. What are your opinions on this?
Today's Shout-Out is for this interview regarding feeding bananas to honey bees and why that may be ok in some situations: www.beekeeping...
11) Do you ever harvest your flow frames at night? I had a jar overflow and the bees are patrolling the area behind the "honey disaster hive".
For those wanting to know what flow hives are, I invite you to visit my information page here: www.fredsfinef...
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