Owensboro, KY Animal Ordinances: Beekeeping (2026)

Section 4-4 is a single, absolute sentence sitting in Chapter 4, Article I, between the city's swine prohibition (§ 4-2) and its chicken-keeping allowance (§ 4-5): "The keeping of bees within the corporate limits of the city is hereby declared to be a nuisance and unlawful." The citation to Code 1955, § 13-107 shows the ban predates the 2025 ordinance that added the city's detailed backyard-chicken permit scheme, and the city chose not to extend a similar permit path to beekeeping when it rewrote the rest of Article I that year; bees remain flatly prohibited rather than regulated by hive count, setback, or zoning district the way chickens now are.

Because the section declares keeping bees a nuisance as well as unlawful, a hive discovered inside the city can be treated both as a code violation and as a public nuisance subject to abatement, distinct from the more calibrated public-nuisance list the property maintenance code applies to junk, weeds, or stagnant water. Since Article I includes no penalty specific to § 4-4, § 4-7 sends enforcement to the citywide general penalty at § 1-11, the same fallback used for the article's ban on killing birds and game.

A resident who wants to keep bees inside Owensboro has no city permit application to file, unlike the $25 chicken permit at § 4-8; the only path around § 4-4 is locating the hives outside the corporate limits, in unincorporated Daviess County or Whitesville, where this city ordinance does not reach.