I am becoming increasingly convinced that the single best step we can take for managing bees in a
sustainable way is to proactively make splits from our best colonies each spring. Everything else seems to be peripheral low value stuff by comparison.
I'll outline in the context of my own beekeeping:
1) I overwinter approximately 12 full sized hives.
2) Each summer I make splits from my colonies, using queen cells from my best few hives.
3) The splits get put into 6 frame poly nucs (highly insulating) and allowed to build up until autumn.
4) They get checked in late autumn to ensure they have stores - I give them a frame or two of capped honey if they are short, from another hive.
Over winter I invariably lose some colonies. But the nucs are there ready and waiting.
Over a few years of doing this my stock has improved - my losses are about the same, but more colonies are strong and healthy in the spring. This method allows me to ignore the mites - if I lose a colony or two it doesn't matter. I also rarely
feed; but this is as much to do with whether you take too large a honey harvest or not.
So this is not really a "STUN" technique, but it lets me ignore all of the other worries that beekeepers seem to have.