Del Norte County Beekeeping Regulations
Local beekeeping rules for Del Norte County and 1 city: 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 ›
Del Norte, California
The county code does not mention bees. Searching the current code for bees, beekeeping, apiary, apiaries, apiculture, hive, honeybee, beehive and honey returns nothing at all, so there is no hive count, setback, permit or registration with the county.
Hive limit: No hive count, setback or permit anywhere in the county code.
Note: Del Norte County appears to leave beekeeping entirely alone, and that reading now rests on something you can repeat. The code moved from Municode to municipalcodeonline, and a search of the live code for bees, beekeeping, apiary, apiaries, apiculture, hive, hives, honeybee, beehive and honey returns nothing, against a control search for the word the that returns over two thousand results, so the index is working and the silence is real. One gap is worth naming rather than papering over. The phrase animal husbandry appears more than a hundred times in this code, and a zoning code can regulate bees without ever using the word, by folding beekeeping into a defined class and then regulating that class in a district table. So treat this as no beekeeping-specific rule rather than a guarantee that no rule can reach you, and if you are planning anything substantial, ask the planning department how they classify an apiary. California still requires apiary registration with the Del Norte County agricultural commissioner, and if you are inside a city its rules are a separate question.
Del Norte County Code ›Crescent City, Del Norte County, California
Crescent City sets no beekeeping standards. Its nuisance chapter makes a nuisance of bees kept in violation of another provision of the code, which by itself neither permits nor forbids keeping them.
Note: Read in full in 2026 and corrected. The card previously quoted this provision as ending at "kept, bred or maintained for any purpose", which reads as though any beekeeping is a public nuisance here. The sentence does not end there: it continues "and in violation of any provision of this code". So it is a derivative rule that bites only when some other provision is already broken, and on its own it neither permits nor prohibits bees. No hive count, setback or permit appears in this chapter, so this is not the whole answer for Crescent City. Check the zoning title and ask the city before relying on the absence of any further rule.
- It is a public nuisance to maintain a property where animals, livestock, poultry or bees are kept, bred or maintained for any purpose AND in violation of any provision of this code. The rule is conditional on breaching some other provision; it sets no standard of its own. 8.08.020(U)
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 · Colusa · Contra Costa · El Dorado · see all 58 ›