Urban beekeeping is gaining salience worldwide. Though beekeeping brings benefits to humanity, it has certain negative aspects. We conducted surveys in eight countries where urban beekeeping is practiced to understand the status of the governance of urban beekeeping. There were a wide variety of rules, ranging from detailed ones to the absence of any. The organizations creating regulations included regional governments, basic governments, and even NGOs. Regulatory items for urban beekeeping were biased toward safety, with few regulations of the other aspects, such as biodiversity conservation and apicultural production. We found a wide range of numerical provisions for this regulation type, with no scientific basis provided, and there is further need for improvements.

Honey prices can vary widely depending on the production areas and/or the nectar plants, and quality control, therefore, is of great significance. Also, the identification of the nectar plants is one of the major concerns regardless of the purposes of beekeeping, namely, commercial, recreational, or for environmental education. In recent years, the scope for the application of eDNA technology has been expanding. We conducted an eDNA analysis of the 14 types of honey sold in supermarkets. The result showed that all of the honey samples contained DNA of several plants and revealed that there was no monofloral honey. In addition, there were cases where there was a discrepancy between the plants listed on the labels and the species whose DNA was the most prominent in the sample. DNA analysis of honey is considered to have the potential to enhance exponentially the understanding of the plant species that honeybees used as nectar plants and their proportions.

Urban beekeeping has gained salience because of its significance in biodiversity conservation and community building. Despite this, beekeeping practices in urban areas have received negative perceptions from residents, which stem from public safety concerns. There is, therefore, a need to enhance and/or work on appropriate rules for maximizing the profits while minimizing the risks. Amongst the present regulations, the installation of barriers and setbacks is the most common rule for public safety. However, only a limited number of empirical studies have reported on their effective location and height. Thus, in this study, an experimental apiary was set up with different types of barriers installed with varying distances to observe and measure flyway patterns of honey bees. We used a 3D laser scanner, which obtained 8529 points of highly accurate flight location data in about five hours. Results showed that the heights (1.8 and 0.9 m) of the barriers installed were effective in increasing the flight altitudes. The distance of the fence, which was installed as close as 1 m from the hives, was effective as well. These findings, which showed that barriers and setbacks are effective, can have regulatory implications in designing apiaries in urban spaces, where location is often restricted.

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