GBA Newsletter

At the Georgia Beekeeping Association's fall meeting, Gina, my friend and president of Metro Atlanta Beekeepers, and I volunteered to write the monthly newsletter for the association.  We came up with a basic formula for what we wanted to include and began with our first issue in October this year.

We now have done three issues and are getting good feedback.  The issues are not only sent out to the registered GBA members, but also are posted here, if you'd like to see what we are doing.

Here's our plan for each month:

• We feature a photo about beekeeping taken by a member at the beginning of each newsletter.
• We ask the president of the association to make a short statement each month.
• We try to feature an article of importance. 
• The first month we featured the Georgia beekeeper of the year;
• in November we featured an article from a well-known Georgia beekeeper, and 
• this month we featured an article by Cindy Bee, a nationally known beekeeper who recently left Georgia to move to Maine 

• We try to come up with a beekeeping tip or a piece of interesting bee information from ApiNews or some other source
• We feature a funny beekeeping adventure from one of our members
• We ask one bee club in the state each month to write up what their club is doing, what speakers they've had that they particularly liked, etc.
• We try to put in about three quotes that are about beekeeping
• Finally, we beg people to send us articles, photos, and informative items

We figured that if we had a basic plan, then we wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel each month.  We ask everyone only to write a paragraph or two to take the pressure off.  However, most people write us more than that.  

So far, so good....but this is only the third month!  We have gotten pretty good feedback so far and I'm having a great time working with Gina.

I've never done a newsletter before.  It's a lot of work.  Literally, we pushed "Send" today to send out the December issue, and Gina said, "Whew.  Ok, now what are we going to do for January?"  And it will take that long to get enough articles and information to do our next issue.

We're hoping our newsletter will help promote beekeeping in Georgia and maybe up the membership of the state organization (it only costs $15 to be a member of the GBA).  I've noticed that the presidents of the three bee clubs we have featured so far are not members of GBA!  

We're open to ideas or suggestions.  If you go to visit the site and read the newsletter, let me know if you have any feedback or thoughts about how it could be even better.