Madera County Beekeeping Regulations
Local beekeeping rules for Madera 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 ›
Madera, California
- Every person maintaining an apiary on premises other than that of his residence shall identify such apiary by affixing a sign thereto showing the name of the owner or person in possession of the apiary, his address, his telephone number, if any, and if there is no telephone, a statement of that fact. 6.20.010
Chowchilla, Madera County, California
Apiaries count as agricultural crop production. That use is permitted by right in the heavy industrial, public facilities and open space zones, needs a conditional use permit in light industrial, and is not allowed in any residential, commercial, mixed-use or office zone.
Hive limit: No hive count or setback is set. The restriction is purely which zone you are in.
Note: Chowchilla’s code never says "beekeeping" anywhere. Apiaries are swept into the definition of agricultural crop production, and the whole question is then decided by the zoning use table, which does not allow that use in any residential zone. Backyard beekeeping inside the city limits therefore has no route. This is a zoning restriction rather than a health one: the animal code goes out of its way to exclude honey-producing bees from its venomous-animal ban.
- "Agricultural crop production" means the use of land for farming, horticulture, floriculture, viticulture, apiaries, tree and sod farms, animal and poultry husbandry and accessory activities. Apiaries are therefore land use D1. 18.96.020
- Agricultural crop production is permitted by right in the OS, PF and I-H zones. Table 18.08.030
- Agricultural crop production requires a conditional use permit in the I-L zone. Table 18.08.030
- Agricultural crop production is not listed in the C-N, C-S, C-H, MX-D, MX or O zones, and under § 18.08.010 a use that is not listed is not allowed. Table 18.08.030
- The residential land use table for the R-L, R-M, R-MH and R-H zones contains no agricultural crop production row, so the use is not allowed in any residential zone. Table 18.08.020
- The animal code’s prohibition on venomous animals expressly excludes honey-producing bees, so bees are not banned as wild or dangerous animals. 6.04.010
Madera, Madera County, California
Madera protects commercial apiculture from nuisance claims under its right-to-farm section. No hive limit, setback or permit requirement was found.
Hive limit: No hive count or setback was found in the code.
Note: Madera is one of the few California cities whose code helps a beekeeper rather than restricting one. Its right-to-farm section names apiculture as an agricultural activity and gives it protection from nuisance claims: once a commercial operation has run for more than a year without being a nuisance, it does not become one because the neighbourhood changed around it. Two limits matter. The protection covers commercial operations only, so it does nothing for a few backyard hives, and it depends on your working to the proper and accepted standards of similar operations locally, which makes good practice a legal question as well as a beekeeping one. We found no hive limit, setback or permit anywhere in the code, and that is a checked result rather than a gap: every section of the code that mentions animals, livestock or agriculture was read and none of them mentions bees. Confirm with the city before siting hives, but there appears to be no local hive limit or setback to comply with.
- Apiculture is included in the definition of an agricultural activity, operation or facility. Consistent with Civil Code section 3482.5, no such activity conducted for commercial purposes and in a manner consistent with proper and accepted customs and standards for similar operations in the same locality becomes a nuisance because of changed conditions in the locality, once it has been operating more than a year and was not a nuisance when it began. 10-3.418(C)-(D)
- The protection does not override the Health and Safety Code, Fish and Game Code, Food and Agricultural Code or the Water Code where those specifically define the activity as a nuisance. 10-3.418(E)
- The Planning Director records a right-to-farm notice against title for prezoning applications, and may require it for subdivisions within 300 feet of agricultural land. The city may also mail an annual notice with the tax bill warning residents near agricultural operations to expect inconvenience. 10-3.418(G)-(H)
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