Wilson County Beekeeping Ag Exemption

Wilson County CAD's policy says bees can be used to establish history, with supporting documentation behind them. That matters on a tract nobody has farmed or grazed, because the hives themselves start the record. The district requires agricultural production shown for five of the preceding seven years, and it names owner records, leases, receipts and notarized statements from adjoining landowners as things that help. We log every visit to your hives, and Outlaw Hideout turns that log into a report you can hand the county. It's documentation toward the claim, not a shortcut through the five years.

Three hives is the floor at five acres, and ten on twenty acres is the ceiling. The hives have to be physically on the land when the application goes in, not ordered or promised for later in the year, and they have to be maintained and kept alive after that. Ours don't leave. We don't take pollination work that hauls colonies off your place, so they're on your land through the winter.

Where vegetation around a hive is limited and needs pollination, the policy requires flowering plants be planted to feed the colony. Whether that reaches your place depends on what's already growing there, so we walk it first and tell you where the gaps in the bloom year fall. On most Wilson County places the mesquite in the pastures already does a lot of the work, horsemint runs prolific through the early summer, and the fall goldenrod closes the year out. Our what-blooms-when rundown is the calendar we walk it against.

Wilson CAD generally treats anything under ten acres with a residence on it as residential, though a smaller tract can still qualify as part of a larger operation worked at the district's intensity. The homesite comes off the top on top of that, an acre to start and adjustable. So five acres with a house on it doesn't leave five for the bees. The residence homestead exemption is a separate claim under Texas Tax Code 11.13, the home plus up to twenty acres, filed on the same terms as any Texas landowner.

The application is due on or before April 30. The district may still take a late one up to certification of the appraisal roll, usually on or before July 20th, and a late filing carries a 10 percent penalty. One district appraises a county, so if your land crosses a county line each one appraises its own side and you must file with both.