" the biggest and best colonies are the most susceptible to varroa related collapse, if not treated in a timely and adequate manner. If by breeding, we ended up with fair to middling colonies that don't succumb to varroa, we would need a lot more hives to produce the same amount of honey."

Two points here.  First I agree that the biggest colony tends to be the first to collapse in the fall.  A lot of this is simple math.  You have two colonies with the same % mite count but one has 60,000 bees and the other has 30,000 bees.  Both shrink to about the same numbers of bees for winter.  Plus, the big one likely had a bunch more brood than the little one so when the brood emerges lots of mites come out also.  So, the big one goes into winter with three or four times the mite count after the hive gets down towards winter population.

The second point is simply the time honored formula for breeding for any trait you want to breed for.  Namely you get what you select for.  If you select for mite resistance that is effective in allowing big colonies to winter ok that is what you get.  If you only select for mite resistance that is good enough to allow smaller colonies to winter that is what you will get.

Right now I consider selection for more swarming to likely be the single biggest breeding error bee keepers make.  We have an awful lot of people in the hobby that use selection for more swarming as their number one breeding tool.  Personally I would swap the most mite resistant bee you could imagine for one that was selected for very minimal swarming.  Every time you go collect a swarm you are selecting for more swarming.  Every time you propagate by raising a queen from a swarm cell you are selecting for swarming.  The solution is simple.  Do not collect swarms, or if you do collect one either use them only as brood factories to boost weak hives recognizing that the weakness of doing that is you are still stuck with the drones from that colony.  The better course is to requeen the swarm with a queen raised from a strong colony that did not swarm.  Also, never raise queens from swarm cells.  Personally I do not consider it worth my time to bother to try and collect a swarm unless they are about two feet from the ground so I can simply put an open box under the swarm and brush them in the box keeping both my feet on the ground.  I find the longer I do not collect swarms the fewer swarms I have.  I have never raised a queen from a swarm cell.  That is easy to do as I seldom check any brood boxes for swarm cells and if I do happen to see one I simply leave it alone.  I do nothing to prevent swarming other than giving adequate space so the top box is not too full of bees.  I do that with both nucs and production hives.  Nucs sometimes get a bit tall.  Sometimes five deep five frame boxes tall.  At that limit a whole box of bees gets pulled and put on a weaker nuc.  Or, if I really do not have a use for the bees simply pull about the top three boxes and leave them on the original stand and move the bottom two boxes to a new stand.  The old queen will be in there someplace.  And the pile without a queen will raise a new one 80% of the time.   Once in a while neither has to raise a new queen as the colony already had two queens.  I have had that happen more than once.  You can always sell extra over wintered nucs in the spring with no problem.

Dick



HL Mencken said: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. "

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