For the past six years, in our Apprentice OnLine Beekeeping course, we devote a week to Bee Laws - Federal, state or province, local. Every student (approximately 1000 at this point) is first shown our MT Bee Act law, which is unique in requiring every beekeeper with 10 hives or more to register by quarter section/GPS. That's about 6000 commercial locations. There's also a 3 mile required buffer zone btw apiaries owned by different beekeepers.
We then ask the students to find and compare to their own rule, laws, directives. As Pete says - it ranges from none, to we have some but no one administers them, to states without inspectors, to about 14 inspectors in FL. Our course objective is to be sure no one says: "Law, what law".
The student all post and share their findings - including citations. Just finding the laws is often the biggest hurdle. Whereas LA may be the easiest to satisfy in regards to honey bottling and sales, some states go off the deep end, worried about raw honey. There's even a state that offers a program to help beekeepers buy ($$) their first bee hive.
Pete - I can talk to UM SELL, we might be able to save off the 1000 or more reports and send to you. We cover both US and Canada. I've not done this before - I've only so many hours in the day. Our courses produce an enormous amount of useful information, but we're busy with the 43 weeks of teaching, and I still have research projects ongoing through my Bee Alert company, and we're working on getting our acoustic app into distribution. I've already failed retirement 3xs over.
Frankly, sorting and tabulating all of the variations in bee and food guidelines, directives, laws will be an enormous task - it's why we haven't done it. Within our courses, each section of approximately 40 students produces enough diversity to illustrate the issue, provide a chance to compare and debate. In more than one state or province, we've probably kicked off some changes. For example, in our most recent Master Class we had a state bee inspector address this issue and it's history within his own state, and he saved boxes of records headed for the dump.
I really opened up a can of worms
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