Yuba County Beekeeping Regulations
Local beekeeping rules for Yuba 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 ›
Yuba, California
- Pursuant to Food and Agricultural Code § 29304, each beekeeper, apiary owner, apiary operator, or person in possession of any apiary, shall pay, in addition to any other fees imposed under this Chapter, an annual registration fee to the Agricultural Commissioner of $10.00 to cover the cost of apiary registration. 6.27.020.
- The Commissioner shall be immediately notified of the arrival, in Yuba County of any shipment of honeybees whose origin is outside of Yuba County, which honeybees shall be held for inspection by the Commissioner for compliance with Section 6.28.030 or otherwise found free of acarine mite. 6.28.040.
Marysville, Yuba 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, so this card no longer reads as unknown. Three caveats are worth carrying, each learned from a real California code 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 then regulating that class in a zoning table. Vocabulary can hide a rule outright, "bee culture" being the most obscure term found so far. And obligations can sit outside the animals and zoning titles entirely, including apiary provisions in wildland-urban interface fire codes. Check Yuba County’s own card as well as this one, since county and city rules differ and the county’s may be the one that binds you. California still requires apiary registration with the county agricultural commissioner.
Municipal code on eCode360 ›Wheatland, Yuba County, California
Wheatland has no beekeeping rule. Bees count as livestock only when kept for profit, so hobby hives fall outside that classification entirely.
Hive limit: No hive count, setback or permit anywhere in the code.
Note: Wheatland sets no beekeeping standards at all: no hive count, no setback, no permit, no prohibition. The single mention of bees anywhere in the code is in the definition of livestock, and the wording matters. Bees are livestock only where they are raised, kept or used for profit, so if you keep a few hives for yourself they are not livestock under this code and the livestock provisions do not apply to you. If you sell honey the classification does apply, so check what the code asks of livestock keepers before you go commercial. State registration with the county agricultural commissioner applies either way.
- "Livestock" includes all animals, poultry, and bees and aquatic and amphibian species which are raised, kept or used for profit. It does not include those species usually kept as pets, such as dogs, cats and pet birds. 18.06.010
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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