I thought the whole problem with colony collapse and the honeybee crisis was that bees were declining and nobody knew how to stop it. If you can stop it with money, maybe that's not ideal, but is it a major problem anymore?
(you, on the other hand, can have high fructose corn syrup and pesticide and fertilizer-contaminated water)
The problem is that building up a new hive is a lot of work for the bees themselves. A new hive needs to collect its own store of honey, raise the new comb to put this new honey in, and raise a lot of new bees to collect the honey, raise the comb, and tend the bee larva. All of this takes a lot of time and energy, and the bees will not be able to collect pollen and nectar as fast while under-beed, so the bees will produce a lot less extra honey for the beekeepers to harvest.
From a survival-of-bees perspective, the critical point is the point at which you can no longer split the surviving hives enough times each year to replace the ones lost overwintering; we're still probably a long ways off from that point.
From a beekeeping and honey perspective, the problem is that you essentially can't count on hives that are new or were split to generate any extra honey for harvest. This means that you need to increase the total number of hives being kept to harvest the same amount of honey. If you want to be able to harvest honey from 100 hives each year, you may need to keep 400 hives around -- 200 will die in the winter, 100 will be used to generate 200 new hives to replace the ones lost overwintering, and the last 100 you can actually take honey off of, which was your goal all along.
And, even though people are figuring out how to deal with the problem, that doesn't mean that the problem is over.
If you view the problem as being that bees are being killed by something, then yes, this doesn't solve the problem. But isn't the problem ultimately how many bees you have, not the rate at which they're reproducing and dying?
The comment I replied to seems to be implying that the death of the honeybee is still nigh, and that this extra money is just temporarily hiding it. But how could that be?
The problem comes when "creating" more bees becomes too expensive/difficult, and you can no longer afford it.
In HN terms: a little cash infusion can make everything look great... until it runs out.
Edit: this comment does a much better job of using HN terms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024771
Since the colonies are still collapsing without explanation, a modicum of pessimism might be understandable, even if it isn't completely justifiable.
Anyway, I think these analogies fail because they keep talking about investors, where you're supposed to be spending money up front for a great return later on. If you're spending more and more money to maintain the same future return then you're in trouble. But things like money spent on bees and honey prices are just straightforward money-for-product transactions.