Yes, the institute of Virology in Wuhan did research on bats up to thousands of kilometers away. There are, after all, only two BSL-4 labs.

However, there is a large population of bats right outside Wuhan, and you can find research by the WIV cataloguing different viruses found in the same province. For example : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31009304/

The key here is that the bats the virus (likely) came from are not actually thousands of miles from Wuhan, but only a few dozen. It's just that since the WIV is a huge institute they sometimes also do research in bats in other regions too, because they don't have such facilities.