My jungle was over 1k blocks away. Once you get a jetpack up and running you'll find the jungle more easily. You can get the bees from the desert without the desert as it also shows up in mesa and a few others.
I'd say you are doing bees as well as you can, nearly. There's a good reason to start bees early as you can, and you hit that right on the head, they will take literal days.
You missed that enderIO does have a bee filter, but you need to get to a latter age to get to it due to requiring the slice and splice.
You've also missed the escorle. Throw the useless drones into here, stacks of them, and use them as fuel "research" the bees. You'll get combs, drops, and breeding notes that will make the process easier.
You could also check your bee villager, I vaugely remember that there's trades where they want drones and princesses occasionally.
Now, for the greenhouse. You won't find documentation. You will not even see it discussed very often.
But I did find ONE video in english that happens to talk about it and give enough detail to get started with in using one. Though I don't intend to use one myself, instead I've waited until ExU's terraformer was a viable option.
I used the escorle to get enough silky whisps to get my bee suit, while breeding up my regular bees into better and better ones. I've not actually had any jungle bees actually deployed, yet. I'm starting to put together the 200ish each that I need to make myself the alviary. Once I get 3 of those I'll be able to start working on the wintery, nether, and end bee branches. I'll try to use modified alviaries as much as possible, saving the usage of the terraformer to change biome only when I need biome specific bee mutations.
Course, on the other hand, I could have just changed my computer clock. Easter would have given me silk whisps without the stinging of the jungle bees. On the other hand, the winter holidays would give me the required ice without needing to breed down either.
It has been very hard to resist this temptation.
