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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.

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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.

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