I’m not convinced that number is very meaningful. Generally healthy bees produce enough excess honey/brood to split/double every year. If you loose 40% but the other 60% doubles you are actually up. You can see in the article that the loss rate in 2010 was 37.8 so it’s typical but slightly up probably within the margins. There is no shortage of bees, if produces wanted to make more bees they would simply change their business practices to decrease surpluses honey and increase surplus bees.