Describe your suggestion

Readjust crafting recipes of tiered beehives & apiaries from Resourceful Bees so you can still make apiaries without the need of going out exploring for bee nests. This could be balanced through crafting cost.
(eg: T1 apiary requires one T4 Bee Nest with no Nether Star or 4 T4 Beehives with a Nether Star) <- this recipe exists already but you need a t3 bee nest in order to get a t4 beehive which makes this recipe pretty much useless at the moment

Why would you like this added/changed?

As of 0.5.16 apiaries require Bee Nests to craft. As far as I am aware they can only be obtained through exploration and by breaking bee nests that generated in the world. In order to craft a T4 Apiary you need at least 22 bee nests (there are currently two crafting recipes for the t1 apiary: one requiring 1 bee nest total and another requiring 4 T4 Beehives which need one T3 Bee Nest each).

Due to the huge amount of different variants of bee nests auto crafting apiaries has become more difficult than before. bee nests also have to be upgraded to T4 bee nests using the in-world hive upgrades from resourceful bees as there is currently no crafting recipe to upgrade them straight away.

Tiered Beehives can only be created using bee nests as a starting point (except the t1 beehive which still accepts any 'forge:beehives/tier_0' according to JEI). tiered beehives can only be upgraded using the in world hive upgrades. When breaking an upgraded beehive (even with silk touch) the applied hive upgrades get lost (Note: Bee Nests on the other hand keep their upgrades).

Side Node: there are also more or less duplicate crafting recipes for t2-4 beehives.

This has been resolved via PR #3421 in dev. Tiered Beehives are being removed in favor of the in-world upgrades - RBees will be doing this in their next major release anyway. Recipes & quests have been adjusted to match.