> Has anyone else on the list met this challenge and succeeded?

Sure, Dad and I had an ob hive down at a state park visitor center, so we
drilled a hole, and then cut a 1/8th-inch slot with a reciprocating saw
sliding along an improvised jig to cut just above the surface of the
interior floor of the ob hive.

We then fabricated a slide-in tray by bending a lip onto a strip of very
thin-gauge (18 ? I forget...) sheet metal that could be sprayed with PAM.

As far as treating the ob hive, we used one Apistan strip back when they
were in fashion, and that worked, later we sliced segments from a Formic
Acid pad, and put in about 1/3 of one pad in with a small desk fan pointed
the primary vents to provide much more air circulation that usual, and that
worked, too.

By "worked", I mean we had varroa at a level sufficient to be of concern,
and the treatment allowed the colony to overwinter in place and survive.

As he expanded his toy to a larger ob hive that held 9 medium frames, we
disassembled it in the fall, and installed the frames in Langstroth boxes,
subsidized with frames of stores left over from combining hives, sometimes
adding some bees via a newspaper combine to supplement the population for a
relatively mild but damp Virginia winter.  This one had a similar metal
varroa tray, and was treated with appropriate larger doses of Formic as I
recall about 1 to 1.5 pads total, depending on population.

Reinfestation was an issue, but as the ob hive was inside, it was fairly
easy to re-treat.  
"The price of honey is eternal vigilance" - they'll likely put that on my
gravestone.

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