You are confusing the structure in your sentence with the structure when the subject is marked as the topic ie:
B は Aに ある
As mentioned in a previous question (What's the difference between には and では),
"は is used to highlight a noun as a topic, and when が or を follows the noun, it is replaced by は. When other particles (e.g. で、に、へ、etc.) follow the noun, は is placed after them."
Let's start with the normal structure, with no topic marker:
Aに Bが ある
If the writer adds は to mark the subject's location as the topic then we get:
Aに は Bが ある
が marks that subject (ie what exists)
に marks the location where it exists
(-> Based on this logic your sentence would be stranger without に rather than without は)
As for which particle is taken by 始まる (if I may rephrase the question slightly), it depends what you want to say. I think this is illustrated by the following sentences which I have taken from the Apple dictionary and SpaceALC (with some modification to the English to make the point clearer):
学校は4月8日9時から始まる|School begins on April 8 at nine. (literally: starts from)
礼拝は祈祷 {きとう}で始まった|The service began with a prayer.
展覧会は来週月曜日に始まる|The exhibition opens on Monday next week.
個人的な実験として始まる | begin as a personal experiment
Note: This is not an exhaustive list of particles that go with 始まる, just some of the more common examples. Japanese does not always translate directly into English consistently (see first example). As shown in the comments by Chocolate below, there are other particles (and compound particles)which may translate into "with".