Can I Keep Bees Here?: The UK Guide to Siting a Hive, Nuisance, Stings, Swarms and Selling Honey

Somebody has bought a hive, and the neighbour has noticed. The question that arrives next is not how to keep bees, because there are excellent British books for that. It is whether you are allowed to, where, and what happens when it goes wrong. Nobody has written that book until now. This is the law on beekeeping in Britain, read at legislation.gov.uk in September 2026 and quoted section by section.
Inside: why there is no licence to keep bees and why that makes your deeds, your lease and your allotment tenancy the documents that actually decide where a hive may go; the split at the centre of the Environmental Protection Act 1990, where section 79(1)(fa) makes insects a statutory nuisance only from industrial, trade or business premises while section 79(1)(f) catches any animal kept anywhere, and Part III never defines either word; why that one unanswered question decides whether a council, or a neighbour in the magistrates' court, can touch a garden hive at all; the twenty one day appeal deadline that arrives with an abatement notice and what missing it costs you; and the provision in section 80(8)(a) that removes the best practicable means defence from the hobbyist and leaves it with the commercial apiary, so the amateur ends up worse off than the professional.
Then liability. Honey bees are not a dangerous species under the Animals Act 1971, because section 6(2) asks whether a species is commonly domesticated here, so there is no strict liability and a claimant has three separate limbs to satisfy. Where the risk actually sits is in the second half of section 2(2)(b), characteristics found at particular times or in particular circumstances, read with section 2(2)(c), which asks what the keeper knew. A hot colony is a legal fact from the moment you know about it.
Then swarms, and the sentence at the end of section 6(3) that almost no beekeeper has read: when an animal ceases to be owned or possessed, the previous keeper continues to be a keeper until another person becomes one. Your swarm does not stop being your responsibility because it has gone.
Then disease, inspection, destruction and the compensation provision that names two subsections and not a third. And selling honey, where country of origin is compulsory, a floral claim needs the honey to come wholly or mainly from that flower, and a place claim needs it to come entirely from that place. Two claims, two thresholds, one label.
Where the answer is not in the legislation, this book says so and tells you what to assume instead. With a keeper's calendar, the conversation to have before the hive arrives, what to do on the day a complaint lands, a table of every provision and its address, an honest list of what is decided in case law and is not in this book, and logs for permissions and colony temper. Nothing in this book is sold.