Colusa County Beekeeping Regulations
Local beekeeping rules for Colusa County and 2 cities: setback distances, hive limits, registration, and a link to each current municipal code.
Statewide: an unregistered apiary is unlawful in California, and your registration is confidential
California requires apiary registration with your county agricultural commissioner, hobbyist and commercial alike, filed through BeeWhere. This is not paperwork you can skip: Food and Agricultural Code § 29045 makes it unlawful to maintain any apiary that is not registered. Register on 1 January each year, or within 30 days after, and within 30 days of bringing bees into the state or taking over an apiary (§§ 29040, 29042). Each registration runs until the following 1 January.
Your registration is confidential. § 29041 puts it outside the Public Records Act and makes it privileged, so it cannot be disclosed to any person or agency other than the department and your county department of agriculture. The one exception is that apiary locations are shared with pesticide applicators, which is the whole point of the system: it is how you get told before a field near you is sprayed.
Registering is what gives you a remedy. Under § 29047 you can only sue for damage to your bees from a pest control operation if you registered and identified your apiary. Under § 29048 an applicator can sue you for losses caused by your failure to register or to request notification.
Fees are set by a schedule under § 29044, which caps the annual registration fee at $250. The 2026 schedule bands it by colony count: 1 to 9 hives $10, 10 to 50 hives $100, 51 or more $250, due 1 January with late fees from 30 January. ⚠ A county board of supervisors may waive the fee entirely for a hobbyist not in the business of beekeeping who keeps nine or fewer colonies, so what you pay at that size depends on your county and can change from year to year.
If your apiary is anywhere other than your own home, § 29046 requires a sign on the entrance side or stencilled on the hive, in dark letters at least one inch high on a contrasting background, giving your name, address and telephone number. Where your city or county has its own identification ordinance, you follow that one instead, which is why the local rules below so often repeat the same wording. Apiaries on someone else's private land need the owner's approval on demand, and on public land an apiary without consent is a public nuisance that can be seized and forfeited.
You must register in every county you keep bees in, but you pay only once a year. Hives that move must be reported within 72 hours, and colonies brought in seasonally for pollination count too. Local city and county rules below are in addition to all of this. Read the 2026 update › or the CDFA index of the bee laws ›
Colusa, California
Apiaries are permitted across the agricultural zones and in Rural Residential and General Recreation, need a minor use permit in Rural Services, and are not allowed in commercial or industrial zones.
Note: Read from Chapter 44 in 2026. The chapter sets no hive limit and no setback for apiaries; it regulates them purely by zone. One gap is recorded honestly: Table 44-2.60-2 lists five natural-resources zones (River Frontage, Flood Management, Forest Residential, Forest Management and Recreation, and Resource Management) but its rows carry only four values, so which of those five permit apiaries cannot be determined from the published table and should be confirmed with the county. Note also that "large-scale bee keeping" is named as an Intensive Animal Operation, which needs a use permit even on agricultural land.
- An apiary is any place where one or more colonies or nuclei of bees are kept. Apiaries also fall within "private animal raising" for noncommercial keeping, and within "agriculture, commercial production". Ch. 44 definitions
- Apiaries are a permitted use in all five agricultural zones: Foothill Agriculture, Exclusive Agriculture, Upland Conservation, Upland Transition and Agricultural Transition. 44-2.20-2
- In the residential zones apiaries are permitted only in Rural Residential. They are not allowed in R-1, R-2, R-3 or R-4. 44-2.30-3
- Apiaries are permitted in General Recreation and need a minor use permit in Rural Services. They are not allowed in the Airport or Public Facilities zones. 44-2.70-2
- Apiaries are not an allowed use in any commercial zone, nor in the Light Industrial, Heavy Industrial or Research and Development zones. 44-2.40-2, 44-2.50-2
- Large-scale beekeeping is classified as an Intensive Animal Operation, alongside dairies, feedlots and CAFOs. It requires a use permit in every agricultural zone and in Heavy Industrial, and is not allowed elsewhere. 44-2.20-2, 44-2.50-2
Colusa, Colusa County, California
The zoning code names apiaries in two definitions but sets no hive limit, setback or permit standard for them.
Note: This card previously showed 50 ft front, 25 ft side and 35 ft building setbacks while its own summary said the code sets no standards. The setbacks were generic zoning yard requirements from the 2020 record, not bee rules, and have been removed. Apiaries appear only in two definitions. Note that the "Animal raising, domestic" definition refers to standards for domestic animal raising elsewhere in the ordinance, which have not been located, so check that before siting hives. A further caution on the source: Municode’s own site may redirect this code to a staff-only staging server; if that happens, search the code from library.municode.com directly.
- Apiaries are named within the definition of "Agriculture, commercial production", alongside farming, dairying, horticulture and poultry husbandry. Art. 4
- Apiaries are also named within "Animal raising, domestic", which covers keeping animals within the standards established in the ordinance for domestic animal raising. Art. 4
Williams, Colusa County, California
This chapter shall not apply to those persons specified in Section 6.44.020. (medical or school use)
Code Of Ordinances ›510 of 512 California entries have been read against the jurisdiction’s live code and carry a re-checked date. How we verify these pages, and the mistakes we look for ›
Other counties: Alameda · Alpine · Amador · Butte · Calaveras · Contra Costa · Del Norte · El Dorado · see all 58 ›