Calendar – NCBA Events – Northern Colorado Beekeepers

CLUB MEETING – OCTOBER @ The Ranch – Bees for Elephants

Oct 21 @ 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm

ELECTIONS: vote for NCBA board members. Want to run for a board chair? email ncbapres@nocobees.org all seats open every year. President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, Program Director and 3 board members at large. SPEAKER: Lorna McCallister

Lorna completed a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation and a minor in Entomology from the University of Florida (UF) 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 studying passerine nesting and mule deer survival. In 2016 and 2017, She interned with the Elephants and Bees Project in Sri Lanka and Kenya to study human-elephant co-existence. In 2020, she received a master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Ecology from UF. 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 a hobbyist beekeeper. She studied beekeeping at UF, through the Tampa Bay Beekeepers Association, volunteering in beekeeping research, and through attending beekeeping conferences. She currently manages Butterfly Pavilion’s 22 honey bee hives and the Bees for Elephants Program.

I haven’t been to Butterfly Pavilion’s beehive fence sites yet, so I don’t have my own pictures of the project, but I’ve attached some pictures of the beehive fencing that are from our partners in Tanzania, the Tanzanian Elephant Foundation.

We would love to use the honorarium to put towards beekeeping equipment or training costs for the November Bees for Elephants trip, if that is okay with your association! Also, if any of your beekeepers have old, gently used equipment like hive tools, gloves, smokers, etc. that they would want to donate, I would happily take it along with me to give in Tanzania!

Topic:

The Bees for Elephants program is an initiative by Butterfly Pavilion to support the use of beehive fencing as a nonlethal elephant deterrent in Africa and Asia. Human-elephant conflict is an increasingly dangerous issue facing rural communities that share shrinking natural landscapes with elephants. Beehive fencing utilizes elephants’ natural fear of honey bees to protect people and their livelihoods from elephants. This November, Butterfly Pavilion will be working with our partners in Tanzania to install more beehive fences and provide training to rural communities struggling with human-elephant conflict. In this presentation, our target species manager, Lorna McCallister, will describe human-elephant conflict and the benefits that using honey bee fences brings to humans and elephants.