The hardy honeybees are back, having returned from dark and mysterious places in the imaginations of the environmentalists. The latest numbers from the Agriculture Department are a stinging rebuke to the doomsayers who spread hysterical tales of a mysterious apocalypse of beedom. In the latest annual survey, federal bee counters reported the lowest rate of over-the-winter bee losses in nearly a decade. Beekeepers call a loss of 19 percent to the cold weather an acceptable mortality rate. The latest loss was not much higher at 23 percent, undercutting the dire storyline pushed by environmentalists that our fuzzy friends would be going the way of the dodo, the passenger pigeon and the dinosaurs unless farmers suspended the use of modern agricultural techniques. Read more.