I was thinking that maybe adding the feature of having a redstone signal on the Apiary block could lock any bees entering the hive, and when a redstone signal is removed, all bees inside are released. I don't know how it would interact with the manually imported bees, but sometimes if I exit my single player world with the bees too close to the walls, they wind up in the walls on world load. It would be a neat way to get all the bees situated rather than having to wait in the Apiary gui or having to break into the Apiary to jar them up manually.

closing due to full apiary rewrite in 1.18