Lake County Beekeeping Regulations
Local beekeeping rules for Lake 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 ›
Lake, California
In the County of Lake, there are no ordinance codes set in place for the ownership of apiaries.
Code Of Ordinances › lakecountyca.gov ›Clearlake, Lake County, California
One beehive per half acre, at least 20 ft from property lines, on a single-family lot in the LDR and MDR districts. Outside those districts there is no hive cap, but no more than two hives may sit within a mile of a populated area.
Hive limit: One hive per half acre in the LDR and MDR residential districts. Elsewhere uncapped, but no more than two hives within a mile of a populated area.
Note: Read in full in 2026 and corrected on both counts. The card required a lot of one acre or more; the code says one hive per HALF acre, so a half-acre lot allows a hive where the old card said no. Its citations were also to the pre-renumbering sections and no longer resolve; the live provision is § 18-18.020(h)(5). Read the second half of that sentence carefully: outside the LDR and MDR residential districts there is no cap on hive numbers, but no more than two hives may be within one mile of a populated area, so the unlimited allowance is really about remote siting. The 20 ft setback is written for the residential districts.
- One beehive is allowed per half acre, placed no less than 20 feet from property lines. 18-18.020(h)(5)
- The number of hives is otherwise unlimited, so long as no more than two hives are within one mile of a populated area. 18-18.020(h)(5)
Lakeport, Lake 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 with no result, over a record that carried no claim to begin with, so the card no longer reads as unknown. Three caveats a reader should carry, all learned from other California codes this year. A code can regulate bees without naming them, by folding beekeeping into a defined use class such as "agriculture" or "animal husbandry" and regulating that class in a zoning table. Some codes use vocabulary an ordinary search misses, "bee culture" being the most obscure found so far. And obligations can sit outside the animals and zoning titles altogether: several California cities put apiary provisions in their wildland-urban interface fire code, requiring a permit to use a smoker in a hazardous fire area, which is a live consideration in Lake County. Note also that neighbouring Clearlake DOES regulate hives, so check your city rather than relying on the county picture. 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 ›
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