When AFK farming, I like to set my settings down to a minimum to reduce resource usage. I have the Minecraft instance set to 10 FPS with a 2 chunk render distance and I usually stand next to the bee farm in this case. The entire farm is within the chunk that is loaded by the player, so I highly doubt it stops processing entities. I do have max RAM set at 512 MB with a few java arguments (listed below) for this instance of the game.

When I set the FPS limit to 30 FPS, bees are able to leave the hives and the honey levels are going up as normal, but when I limit it to 10 FPS, honey levels stop progressing and it seems that bees cannot leave the hives. The farm is in The End dimension, however it does not seem to be the same issue as the others having their farms not working when unloading chunks. This issue seems to be FPS bound.

JVM arguments: -d64 -XX:+DisableExplicitGC -XX:+UseG1GC -Dsun.rmi.dgc.server.gcInterval=2147483646 -XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:G1NewSizePercent=20 -XX:G1ReservePercent=20 -XX:MaxGCPauseMillis=50 -XX:G1HeapRegionSize=32M -XX:+UseStringDeduplication