El Dorado County Beekeeping Regulations
Local beekeeping rules for El Dorado 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 ›
El Dorado, California
El Dorado County treats beekeeping as an agricultural enterprise and sets no hive limit. Rules sit in two places: Chapter 6.44 governs how an apiary is kept, and Title 130 zoning adds a 100 ft property-line setback and allows apiaries only in certain residential zones.
Hive limit: No county hive limit. Zoning sets a 100 ft setback from any other property boundary, waivable with the adjacent resident’s written consent.
- Setback — no apiary may be located within 100 feet of any other property boundary without the written consent of the adjacent resident. § 130.40.080
- Bee keeping must meet industry standards as approved by the Agricultural Commissioner, in addition to Chapter 6.44. § 130.40.080
- Water supply — an adequate supply available in the immediate vicinity of the apiary. § 6.44.190
- Fire protection — in forest land where there is fire danger, clear a 3 ft firebreak to mineral soil around the apiary, and keep a shovel and a fire extinguisher on site whenever you are working it. § 6.44.200
- Identification sign — if the apiary is not at your residence, post your name, address and phone number, or your current active brand number, on the entrance side. § 6.44.160
- Landowner permission — written permission is required before placing an apiary on land you do not own or lawfully possess. § 6.44.150
- Flyway barriers — apiaries near schoolyards or places where people congregate must sit behind a barrier, natural or built, that makes bees fly high over them. § 6.44.140
- Transporting — park or screen any vehicle carrying hives so the bees are not a hazard or nuisance while stopped. § 6.44.210
- No separate county registration. Statewide California registration with the County Agricultural Commissioner is the only requirement. Those fees fund a dedicated bee inspector each March through June. § 6.44.180
- County fees apply to export certification only — certifying an apiary's condition for transport to another state or country, charged at staff time plus mileage. §§ 6.44.010, 6.44.020
- Two miles between commercial locations. The established beekeeper in an area has first rights. Waivable if the other commercial beekeeper agrees, or when a county grower contracts pollination — that waiver lasting up to 10 days past the end of bloom. Property owners keeping their own bees are exempt. § 6.44.170
Placerville, El Dorado County, California
Placerville recodified onto American Legal Publishing. The 2020 compilation recorded no local apiary rules, but that predates the move and has not been re-checked.
Placervilleca ›South Lake Tahoe, El Dorado County, California
No local beekeeping rule found in the municipal code. State registration with the county agricultural commissioner still applies.
Note: Searched against the live code in 2026 and no beekeeping provision was found, which agrees with the 2020 review. The card no longer treats this as unknown. Two caveats a reader should keep: a code can regulate bees without naming them, by folding beekeeping into a defined use class such as "animal husbandry" and then regulating that class in a zoning table, and this is a search of the published code rather than a lawyer's reading. California still requires apiary registration with the county agricultural commissioner.
Municipal code on eCode360 ›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 · Del Norte · see all 58 ›