Kings County Beekeeping Regulations
Local beekeeping rules for Kings County and 4 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 ›
Kings, California
In the County of Kings, there are no ordinance codes set in place for the ownership of apiaries.
Code Of Ordinances › countyofkings.com ›Avenal, Kings County, California
No hive may be kept within 200 ft of any residence, school, church, store, hotel or other place of habitation. There is no hive limit, but the radius rules out most in-town sites.
Hive limit: No hive limit. The constraint is the 200 ft radius from anywhere people are.
Note: Read in full in 2026. The card pointed at a zoning use table and carried no figures; the rule that governs is in Title 6, Sanitation and Health, among the unlawful acts. No hive may be within 200 ft of a residence, school, church, store, hotel or "any other place of habitation", and that catch-all is what makes it severe: on an ordinary town lot there is nowhere to put a hive that satisfies it. Note the text says "any residence" without excepting your own. There is no cap on hive numbers, so the distance is the whole of the rule. The one exception is narrow and unusual: an observation hive inside a school, or bees in a physician's office or laboratory for research, provided they cannot fly at large. A separate ordinance also excludes bees from the definition of household pets, so nothing in the pet allowances helps. One caveat on the drafting: § 6-1.05 is framed as things an owner must not let THE ANIMAL do, and every other item on the list fits that, while the bee provision describes something the keeper does. It does not sit comfortably in the sentence it hangs from. Read it as the city plainly intends, a 200 ft limit on hive placement, but if it ever mattered to you the point is worth raising with them.
- It is unlawful to keep any hive of bees within 200 feet of any residence, hospital, sanitarium, public eating place, school, church, office building, store, hotel, apartment house, roominghouse, or any other place of habitation. 6-1.05(f)
- The 200 ft rule does not apply to bees kept within an educational institution for study or observation, or within a physician's office or laboratory for medical research, treatment or other scientific purposes, provided the bees are not permitted to fly at large. 6-1.05(f)
- Household pets are defined to exclude bees, alongside horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, ducks, geese, turkeys, roosters and fowl constituting an agricultural use. So the allowances for keeping pets do not extend to a hive. Ord. 95-06
- The section opens "No owner or possessor of any animal shall cause, permit, or allow THE ANIMAL to do any of the following". Subsections (a) to (e) all describe things an animal does — running at large, trespassing, barking, being neglected, being abandoned. Subsection (f) instead describes something a PERSON does, keeping a hive. It does not fit the sentence it hangs from. 6-1.05
Corcoran, Kings County, California
In the City of Corcoran, there are no municipal codes set in place for the ownership of apiaries.
Municipal code on American Legal ›Hanford, Kings County, California
Bees are prohibited on premises not zoned for agricultural use. On agriculturally zoned land they are not.
Hive limit: Not confirmed — see the code
Note: This card previously showed a citywide prohibition. The ban is zoning-based: agriculturally zoned land is not covered.
- It shall be unlawful to bring, have, keep, or maintain within the city any swarm or swarms, colony or colonies of bees on any premises within the city that have not been zoned for agricultural use. 6.08.070
Lemoore, Kings County, California
Defined as Animal Husbandry. See municipal code for further regulations.
Municipal code on American Legal ›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 ›
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