The USPS has been handling poultry for probably as long as it has existed. (I received live birds in the mail just last week!) There is a special vented and reinforced mailer that is used. Newly hatched birds have nutritional energy reserves and don't need food or drink for a couple days. The biggest issue is temperature, even in summer. Hatchlings usually have a mother to warm them to 95 degrees. So most shipments have 15 or more birds so they can keep each other warm. Some farms even throw in an extra "warmer" bird on a order. I've received many shipments and never had a dead bird.
Too funny. “Via air transportation. Only queen honey bees may be shipped via air transportation. Each queen honeybee shipped via air transportation may be accompanied by up to eight attendant honeybees.”
Perhaps it's because my family has always been beekeepers, but I don't get the joke? It's just standard procedure to ensure the queen can adapt properly.
One part that stands out is that "only queens" can be mailed, but attendants are allowed. As I read that, if I for some reason wanted to mail 8 non-queen bees, it would somehow only be legal if I added a queen.
There's an Always Sunny in Philadelphia episode that covers this question, if you've seen it maybe you will remember the big "H" on the box is for "Hornets" so we all know it's a box full of hornets...
I mean, you could try mailing someone a box of hornets with a big "H" on it and tell them it's a present and the H stands for "Happy Housewarming," but you were talking about legitimate reasons to mail bees, right?
"I usually look for the ones that stand out... Like if they're wearing red shirts. Those will be removed before the other attendants. I mean, they're just asking for it! No more than 8 allowed per shipment!"
My father is a beekeeper. Once we were transporting honeybees. Queen honeybees are often delivered with mail for breeding and other purposed. Well they got stuck in the customs for few days without any reasonable explanation at first. Then got an invoice for unpaid alcohol tax ... turned out that someone had written "Caution! Live Beer" instead of "Live Bees" at some point, almost killing the queens.
'Real ale' has live yeast, since it hasn't been pasteurized. It doesn't last on the shelf as long, but it's alive. You can also pirate it if you like the taste.
For those who don't know, it's common (and essential) to ship honeybees around the country to where they're needed. Honeybees are shipped around different parts of the country all the time depending on the season and what kind of agriculture needs to be produced. There was a Planet Money episode on it I think... yup, here it is:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/02/24/517076055/episo...
Yes, but I thought it was worth mentioning for people who might not be able to imagine why anyone would seriously want to mail bees in the first place.
The commenter is saying that is not why you would mail bees and therefore not worth mentioning. They then give a useful example of what is mailed for the benefit of those who couldn't imagine why you would mail bees.
One of the seasons of Outback Truckers show some guys transporting live hives around to various locations for a season. They have to be fast so the hives don't come alive and leave.
Probably misremembering, or it was simple TV hyperbole; it's fairly easy to seal up a hive for transportation so that the bees cannot get out.
Hives do "swarm" though -- basically, vacating their box en masse -- so it's possible that they were referring to avoiding this behavior, which could maybe be induced by having a hive box sealed up for too long.
I remember one late night I was at a large USPS center for work, and there were a bunch of packages sitting nearby. I was talking to the USPS official about the work that needed to be done, and suddenly... one of the packages moved! I nearly jumped out of my skin and told him that the package moved! He was very calm, and said "yep, those are geese". And then proceeded to tell me all the different types of animals (and bees) they routinely ship.
Naw, a goose sized-scorpion would probably collapse under its own weight. Exoskeletons just don't work for large animals. Respiration would also fail, as would the open circulatory system they have. The square-cube law is quite unforgiving of arbitrarily scaling animals.
My wife (who teaches at a university, not to be named here) once had flesh-eating beetles FedEx'ed to her lab in order to clean skeletons for student use. Unfortunately the box had a hole punched in it sometime during transport, and the FedEx guy literally ran into her office, threw the box, with beetles coming out of it, on her desk and ran back out.
It turns out that you're allowed to mail ants, but not ant queens. That is because it is generally illegal to ship ant queens across state lines. (Ants are very good at becoming invasive species.)
This is why if you buy an ant farm for your kids, the ants you get will always die out. :-(
Wearing a beekeepers suit and driving a car with boxes of beehives in the back seat makes traffic law about as applicable to you as it is to cops. Don't ask me how I know.
There's a queen bee farm (right term?) in my neighborhood. One time I walked into the post office and as soon as I open the door I hear a roar of buzzzzz... There was at least a full pallet of flat-rate boxes of bees.
Yes, beekeepers will routinely replace their queens with fresh ones, although queens can last several years. The "farm" in your neighborhood was probably someone breeding queens for sale, which are shipped in a small box with a few worker bees. It could also have been someone selling "nucs" (nucleus colonies) -- basically, starter hives -- although these packages would have been substantially larger.
I ship roaches on a regular basis through USPS. Good thing they accept them because UPS and Fedex label them as "pest" insects. They're just misunderstood. I label the box as "Live Insects" as a precaution which leads to me having to explain why I'm shipping them. Always gets some smiles and funny comments at the post office!
All kind of horrifying... lizards specifically can die if it gets cold enough.
I have a couple bearded dragons thinking of someone just shipping them, taking it to chance they don't get too cold and get sick, scared and alone is just a sad sad sad thought.
I have bought and sold hundreds of invertebrates around the world, all transported by standard mail services.
I've sent probably 40 parcels successfully and received around 80 in the past 15 years. We avoid sending them in winter, if it's not the height of summer (depending on species) we enclose heat packs. They are always extremely well insulated, ventilated and padded. Poor packaging and mailing is heavily criticised in the pet invertebrates hobby, people are ostracised if they continue to endanger livestock or potentially cause injury to mail workers.
I had one parcel containing dozens of centipedes from China damaged, with centipedes escaping.
I had a parcel from Germany containing tarantulas sat at the post office for days because the postman on foot thought the parcel was too big and the one with the van disagreed. Tarantulas died.
I have some limited experience of mailing reptiles in the UK from around 15-20 years ago but it's heavily frowned upon, probably illegal and reputable dealers will only use pet couriers. I could imagine a small snake could be mailed safely but I'm also horrified at the thought of mailing a bearded dragon or chameleon.
I was quite the tarantula enthusiast at one time, and also sent and received a lot of spiders in the mail. I once had an Aphonopelma species - a desert dwelling tarantula - arrive completely frozen solid when the shipper said it would have heat packs (and was only a 1 day trip from AZ).
I'll skip the boring part of the story, but it thawed, and lived.
USPS/FedEx overnight is the go-to method for shipping snakes in the US. There is special packaging to maintain consistent temps. That's how I got my carpet python
I should correct my statement, I meant to say UPS/FedEx - not sure why USPS cares about snakes but until I hear more I'm going to blame Samuel L. Jackson
Of course the person who ships animals via any mail service has to ensure proper conditions. So don't ship animals when the weather is either to hot or too cold, and of course proper packaging is important too. Some species, like aquarium shrimps, can easily be sent by mail as long as the temperatures are ok, but for example in Germany, there also exists delivery services who specialize on animal transport. They guarantee over night delivery and also keeping the animals away from heat or cold.
Yeah, stuff goes wrong in shipping, particularly since it seems most people have a vague idea that packages just teleport to the destination. When it gets cold, this means issues like exploding wine bottles and frozen tropical fish.
It's fascinating to me how disparate experiences are with the USPS. I've probably received hundreds of packages from Amazon via USPS, plus years worth of mail, with maybe one or two incidents of minor damage to the packages.
I wonder if anyone has done research into whether this is region-specific. Maybe certain processing facilities are older or have problematic management?
Its at least nationwide. Three hundred million happy people, a handful of unhappy people, we will read endlessly online about how awful the service is. Online review sites suffer from the same effect. See also the safety of jetliner travel.
I worked at a rural post office for a little over a year, sometimes we'd get chicks going out to the farms - other times it was insects. Pretty impressive the scope of services offered by the postal service
Meh. I was a Fedex Ground truck loader for 2 summers. When the box of Crickets en route to a petstore has a tear in the container and crickets are wandering all over the bed of the truck and boxes -- it's gross.
I was surprised to see they did not list tarantulas, I've bought many that were shipped via USPS and I imagine they actually ship more of them than scorpions.
I think HN has been deteriorating lately because of comments lame jokes. There are a bunch in this story.
Yeah. I just hope that the sun doesn't stay down one day because of the so called jokes in some threads. People waste so much time trying to be funny. (sarcasm--attempted at least)
The funny part, at least for me, was the specific number of bees (8) attending to the queen. It's good to be the King /Queen comes to mind and how did they decide the exact number...
Differences in what is funny is why I think jokes just don't work well on discussion forums. I assume that this is the reason they are called attendants. Things that seem to follow logically are not comical to me.
The term "attendants" didn't come from anyone joking around in this thread. The linked USPS information page uses the word because it's what beekeepers call them:
> Monday morning myth: attendants must be removed from queen cages
> Many beekeepers believe that you must remove attendant bees from queen shipping cages before you introduce a caged queen into a hive. They believe the queen will more likely be killed by the receiving hive if both the attendants and the queen have a foreign odor.
> This simply is not true. If you install the caged queen properly, the attendants will cause no problem. Before long the queen’s pheromone will circulate throughout the hive. All the bees—as well as the attendants—will then smell the same.
No matter the forum, there will always be someone who doesn't understand the joke. That's not going to stop the rest of us from being entertained, however.
Things remain mostly the same. How we perceive them changing tells us much about how we, ourselves, are changing.
On the other hand, it's probably better they restrict the number of worker bees. What would happen if someone shipped a full nest of bees via airmail, and they somehow got loose on a commercial flight?
In my experience, USPS has been at least as reliable as FedEx and UPS. I've had more issues with those two (late shipments, delivery to wrong address, losing things in the mail) than I've had with USPS.
I've also been impressed with their physical locations. The workers are attentive and helpful (I don't mail letters very often; they have the answers to my many questions). This has been contrary to the stereotype of the post office being similar to the DMV.
To add a data point, my experience at several post offices has been terrible. Right in par with the DMV.
You don't know anger until a post office working starts sliding the security bars closed (at 4:30 pm) cutting the long line in half and telling the people that are on the wrong side that they will have to come back tomorrow.
And what the hell kind of service business closes at 4:30. Making it literally impossible for anyone with a day job to EVER pick up their package (that they should have delivered anyway but didn't because the carrier didn't want to look for the box in his truck and just tiptoed up to your door and stuck a note on it).
Luckily, most post offices stay open longer now. But I still see nothing but long lines and poor service when I have to go.
It depends greatly on your location. Mine is very bad, I've lost maybe 10 packages over the past few years or so. Thankfully Amazon has been kind, but I worry I may eventually raise a flag there, even though I tell them constantly my local usps is trash.
The people in my post office are extremely rude and about as "I don't care" or "not my problem" as you can imagine. To be fair, I've also seen some extremely rude customers in the past too. From what I see, they are also very understaffed and probably under paid, but then again they have godly benefits and job security.
You have a lot more recourse with USPS, from calling the inspector general to getting your congressman involved.
With UPS/Fedex, forget it. They have bad branches too, particularly Fedex ground.
The other thing as a smallish shipper you can actually use the insurance. If you make claims with UPS/Fedex, they'll retailiate by raising your negotiated rates.
I agree. I have spent in the low thousands with USPS shipping books and goods and the experience is copasetic along with receiving mail and packages.
By comparison, UPS and Fedex are often the source of unpleasant surprises for me as a recipient of packages from various online retailers. I love the USPS and it saddens me to see the vitriol directed towards it.
Hub to hub nearly all services are reliable, it's the 'last mile' service that has such extreme variability from area to area. That's why when I mail a package to someone else I try to ask them about which services are more reliable /in their area/ (since I attempt to drop off at fixed, staffed, locations, USPS offices and the like).
You're a good man (or woman). I wish more shippers were like you. I'm a frantic wreck when I order a guitar; never knowing what condition it might show up in at the mercy of the shipper.
