I was testing an autofarming system with bee hives and noticed that as long as you have bottles you can constantly get honey bottles, no matter what the honey level is for bee hives/nests. This will work even if the bee hive/nest honey level is at 0. The Bee hive in the attached image is at level 0 and is still producing honey bottles.
The zip file attached contains the world I was using.
Thank you for your report!
We're actually already tracking this issue in MC-159359, so I resolved and linked this ticket as a duplicate.
If you would like to add a vote and any extra information to the main ticket it would be appreciated.
If you haven't already, you might like to make use of the search feature in the future to see if the issue has already been reported.