Orange County Beekeeping Regulations
Local beekeeping rules for Orange 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 ›
Orange, California
In unincorporated Orange County, apiaries are a use requiring a Use Permit. The base district land use table carries an apiaries row reading UP in five columns and a dash in two, so they need a permit where allowed and are not permitted in the remaining districts. Which district is which has not been read column by column.
Hive limit: No colony cap in the table. The control is the Use Permit rather than a number.
Note: Two things decide this and only one of them is settled. The settled part: in unincorporated Orange County an apiary is not a use you may simply start. The base district land use table at § 7-9-31.2 carries a row for apiaries reading UP across five columns and a dash across two, which means a Use Permit under § 7-9-134 where it is allowed at all, and no apiary in the districts marked with a dash. The unsettled part is which district is which. The table has seven columns and this reading did not capture the headers, so this card does not tell you whether your particular base district is one of the five or one of the two. Open § 7-9-31.2 and read the apiaries row against the column headings before relying on anything, because the difference between UP and a dash is the difference between an application and a refusal. The county also defines agriculture to include apiaries, alongside crop cultivation and produce stands selling what is grown on site, and expressly excludes cannabis. If your address is inside a city rather than unincorporated county land, none of this applies and the city card is the one to read. California still requires apiary registration with the Orange County agricultural commissioner.
- Apiaries require a Use Permit under § 7-9-134 in the base districts where they are listed, and are not permitted in the districts marked with a dash. § 7-9-31.2, land use table
- Which base districts carry the Use Permit and which do not has not been read column by column. Check the apiaries row against the table headings for your district. § 7-9-31.2
- Agriculture is defined to include apiaries and produce stands selling products produced on site, and expressly excludes cannabis. § 7-9-135.1
- These are the rules for unincorporated county land. Each incorporated city sets its own. Title 7, Div. 9
Anaheim, Orange County, California
Beekeeping is prohibited or declared a nuisance here. Read the linked section for scope and any exceptions before keeping bees.
- 6.28.010 BEEKEEPING PROHIBITED. — see the section for scope and exceptions. 6.28.010 BEEKEEPING PROHIBITED.
- It shall be unlawful for any person, firm or corporation to keep or suffer to be kept or maintained within the corporate limits of the City of Anaheim any hive or hives, swarm or swarms of honey bees; provided, however, that this prohibition shall not apply to any property which is zoned “T” Transition Zone, “RH-1” Single-Family Hillside Residential, or the Anaheim Canyon Specific Plan No. 2015-01 (SP 2015-01) Zone and for which a Conditional Use Permit has been approved for beekeeping pursuant to Title 18 of this code. 6.28.010 BEEKEEPING PROHIBITED.
Fullerton, Orange County, California
- (2) Colonies of bees exhibit defensive or objectionable behavior or interfere with the normal use of neighboring properties; § 6.01.030 PUBLIC NUISANCE DESIGNATED; SITE.
- (3) Colonies of bees swarm due to failure to requeen or without response to contain or relocate within three days; § 6.01.030 PUBLIC NUISANCE DESIGNATED; SITE.
Laguna Niguel, Orange County, California
- In the city, every person owning, leasing or controlling or operating any apiary, house, cabin, hotel or other building or structure upon or adjoining any mountainous or forest or brush-covered land covered with other inflammable vegetation, and every person owning, leasing or controlling any such land, shall at all times maintain upon his land around or adjacent to such apiary, cabin, house, hotel or other building or structure an effective fire protection or firebreak. Sec. 11-3-97.
Mission Viejo, Orange County, California
No beekeeping standards were found. The code names bees only in a nuisance clause that depends on some other provision being broken, and inside its definition of agriculture.
Hive limit: No hive count and no beekeeping-specific standard found.
Note: Mission Viejo does not appear to have a beekeeping rule, and the two places bees are mentioned do not add up to one. The nuisance chapter says that bees kept in violation of any provision of the city code are a nuisance, which is circular: it only bites if some other section is being broken, and we could not find another section that regulates beekeeping. The other mention is inside a definition of agriculture, which lists apiaries alongside farming and animal husbandry without saying where that use is allowed. So the honest position is that the code is silent on the substance, and silence is not the same as permission. Before you set up hives, ask the city planning department directly whether beekeeping is allowed in your zone and get the answer in writing, because a nuisance clause with no underlying standard is exactly the kind of provision a complaint can be built on later.
- Animals, livestock, poultry or bees kept, bred or maintained for any purpose or in violation of any provision of the City Municipal Code are designated a nuisance. 9.59.110
- Apiaries are named inside the definition of a land use activity that includes farming, dairying, grazing, horticulture, floriculture, viticulture, animal and poultry husbandry and accessory activities. 9.01.050
San Clemente, Orange County, California
- It shall be unlawful for any person to have, keep, or maintain any hive or swarm of bees within the city without a permit. 6.28.060
Santa Ana, Orange County, California
Hive limit: (1) No more than two (2) hives may be maintained on a single-family residential property with six thousand (6,000) square feet or less.
- (4) Hives must either be screened so that bees must fly over a six (6) foot barrier, which may be vegetative, before leaving the property, or be placed eight (8) feet above the adjacent ground floor. Sec. 5-7.
- (2) A water source for the bees shall be provided at all times on the property where the bees are kept to discourage bee visitation at swimming pools, hose bibs and other water sources on adjacent public or private property. Sec. 5-7.
- Bees or hives shall be considered a public nuisance when any of the following occurs: Sec. 5-7.
- (1) Colonies of bees that exhibit defensive or objectionable behavior, or interfere with the normal use of neighboring properties; Sec. 5-7.
- (2) Colonies of bees swarm; Sec. 5-7.
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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