In short we won. The chair cut the unfavorable language and returned the regulations around beekeeping to the status quo.

Bill 10/Bill 64 was part of the City’s efforts to modernize the City and Counties Land Use Ordinances (LUO.) The LUO are the regulations that the City uses. The States regulations are defined by the Hawaii Revised Statues (HRS.) The LUO had large undefined sections that left legal grey areas and hampered the City’s functionality. The City decided it was time to modernize the LUO. Beekeeping has been regulated under the HRS for as long as I have been alive and beyond. So any issue regarding beekeeping, even when dealing with the City, would be default to the HRS.

Bill 64/Bill 10 updated the City’s regulations in the LUO. Beekeeping was included in this update. The City Council referred the intellectual work of crafting the regulations to the Department of Planning and Permitting, who referred it to a 3rd party consulting company.

At this point it was hard to determine why they wrote the regulations the way that they did. Did they barrow a statue from another state? Was there a special interest group that had a desire to limit beekeeping and beekeepers? I guess we’ll never know. What we do know is that they determined to limit the number of colonies on agricultural land.