Funny thing I learned was that the bears aren’t usually after the honey. They’re after the bee larvae.
Around st Helen's area one year elk hunting, we were seeing bear scat everywhere that hadn't the weirdest yellow and black objects in it my dad was convinced it wasn't bear, than we started see ground hornet/wasp nests everywhere that look like they had been cleaned out.. story I heard from an old timer we ran into was exactly what u were saying, there going after the larvea, he claimed the didn't really care about the bees to much, but in a hurry would bail from the wasps would end up swelling a bunch of wasps whole as there swallowing the larvae up.. I'm talking about 50 different piles of scat over a week. Pretty crazy for aure