The author is actually expliciting stating "Yep, there is an increase in bee deaths but the total number of bees is substantially higher so the supposed negative effect of these increased deaths is overstated or wrong" I don't think that's dodgy.
[1] the author is claiming that the number of colonies of domesticated bees is higher (not the number of bees),
[2] the author ignores non-domesticated bees and thus misses a significant economic contributor that matters for agricultural pollination, if not honey.
It's particularly dodgy because you're an example of a reader who came away thinking, "But there's more bees so that's good!" That's a false conclusion, the blame for which I lay partly at the feet of this author.
You can spend more money on your Adwords campaigns and get a measurable increase in absolute page views or absolute conversions. However, the KPI's that your investors care about are things like your cost-of-acquisition.
If it's actually the case that you're spending more just to maintain the same conversion because you're losing customers at a higher rate, that indicates something is wrong.
I know all analogies break down with scrutiny but I think the major issue here is you're assuming bees are customers when in actuality bees are the workers, honey is the product or service and the customers' consume honey. To put this in startup terms "We're seeing higher employee turnover and so our expenses are rising because we're spending more to recruit and retain works and those workers are more expensive and less productive till they get up to speed (and with high employee churn might leave us before they're fully productive) Higher costs suck because we've had to raise the prices for our service to offset but the market has absorbed a 2x increase in our prices since 2006 so it's not exactly all bad"
... and in that situation, a headline suggesting the crisis is over ("Call off the Bee-pocalypse") would be misleading. Especially since the all indications show the problem continues to get worse.
