Mariposa County Beekeeping Regulations
Local beekeeping rules for Mariposa County: 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 ›
Mariposa, California
No beekeeping chapter, no hive count and no setbacks. Apiculture is named twice, both times inside the definition of an agricultural activity or operation, which places beekeeping among the county's agricultural uses rather than leaving it unmentioned. Which zoning districts permit an agricultural activity has not been read.
Hive limit: No hive count, setback or permit specific to bees. The control, if there is one, will be in the zoning district tables through the agricultural activity classification rather than in a beekeeping section.
Note: Mariposa has no beekeeping chapter, but it does not ignore beekeeping either, and the difference matters for what to ask. The zoning title at § 17.148.010 defines an agricultural activity or operation to include the production, cultivation, growing, harvesting and processing of timber or apiculture, and § 18.04.010 carries the same definition for its own title. Definitions are written because an operative provision needs them, so being named as an agricultural activity is a real consequence: it puts beekeeping inside the county's agricultural classification, which is the usual hook for right-to-farm protection against nuisance complaints from newer neighbours. What has not been established is where an agricultural activity is permitted. That answer lives in Title 17's district tables, which have not been read for this card, and a use table is exactly the kind of rule no word search can see. So the practical step is to ask the planning department which districts allow an agricultural activity or operation and whether an apiary is treated as one for your parcel. The county also defines animal husbandry as the breeding and raising of any and all livestock and other animals, which is broad enough to be worth asking about in the same conversation. California still requires apiary registration with the Mariposa County agricultural commissioner.
- Apiculture is expressly within the definition of an agricultural activity or operation for the purposes of the zoning title. § 17.148.010
- The same definition of an agricultural activity or operation, including apiculture, applies in Title 18. § 18.04.010
- Animal husbandry is defined as the breeding and raising of any and all livestock and other animals, and agriculture is defined as animal husbandry and the production of crops. § 17.148.010
- Which zoning districts permit an agricultural activity has not been read. Ask the planning department how an apiary is classified for your parcel before relying on the absence of a beekeeping section. Title 17 district regulations
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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