John Sewell asks:
> Why is robbing such a problem? ...
and the descrobes his observations to date regarding robbing:
> I have never observed any frenzied activity during or after this, only the
occasional bee
> getting chucked out of a hive that they're unwelcome in.

Aaron Morris answered
If you have not observed the frenzy, you haven't observed real robbing.
Entire yards can get into a fit when robbing gets going in ernest.  Robbing
bees aren't nice to each other.  Many bees die.  Entire colonies (the ones
being robbed) can perish.  It's not a pretty site.

My contribution.
I have watched one colony invade another colony about 20 meters apart about
15 years ago.  I posed the hypotheses of this as a result of a bees
territorial inclination. I had a fairly strong colony (a) in the corner of
my garden, established for about a year.  I moved a hive(b) over from
another site into my garden.  The next day I had a frantic phone call to
come and sort my bees out.  When I arrived there were very few bees left of
hive 'b' and the remaining sisters had been effectively subdued by colony
'a' and were sitting on the outside on one side of the hive.  There were
thousands of dead bees around hive 'b' and the bees from hive 'a' were still
in a fighting mood as they tried to get at me.  Prior to this occasion, hive
'a' had two supers on and were slowly building up the surplus.  Hive 'b' had
one full super. There was little that I could do and the frenzy died down.
I then looked into hive 'b'.  There was no honey stores and even the capped
brood had been pulled out.  When I checked on hive 'a', I found that both
supers were chock 'n block full of honey.

I had an occasion when trying to raise queens of robbing.  I had set up the
nursery hives with an internal feeder. Within an hour of setting up the
nursery and installing queen cells, I found the bees in the area robbing.
They entered the nuc boxes and promptly emptied all the sugar water from the
feeders.  The queen cells were also attacked.

Not only do bees steal honey but they also take wax.  In this instance I
have observed that the condition is related to what we call "trek swarms". A
swarm of bees moved into a empty box and started removing wax wherever they
could find it, including my wax foundation sheets in the garage. The bees
that did the wax redistribution kept to their occupation until death with no
bees from in the same colony taking on this duty.

Eddy Lear
South Africa