Meet Your Instructor: Lorna McCallister

Lorna completed a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation and a minor in Entomology from the University of Florida in 2015. Between her undergraduate and graduate degrees, Lorna worked on various research projects in the U.S. and abroad. She worked for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission studying diseases in deer and panthers, tracking wild turkey nesting, and finding roosts of endangered bonneted bats. In Colorado, she worked on projects for Colorado State University studying passerine nesting and Colorado Parks and Wildlife studying mule deer survival. She interned with the Elephants and Bees Project in Sri Lanka and Kenya to study human-elephant co-existence and with Wild Tomorrow Fund in South Africa to study suni antelope movement. In 2020, she received a master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Ecology from the University of Florida. For her thesis, she studied how changes to savannah vegetation are affecting insect and avian pollinators in the Kingdom of Eswatini. This project initiated her interest in pollinator research and native bee conservation.

In addition to studying wildlife, Lorna is an expert beekeeper and instructor for Beekeeping Bootcamp at Butterfly Pavilion. She studied beekeeping at UF, through the Tampa Bay Beekeepers Association, and through attending beekeeping conferences. She currently manages Butterfly Pavilion’s honey bee hives.