This is a topic of some interest and one that is within our ability to control I believe through co-operation between queen producers, shippers, and beekeepers. Queen producers and beekeepers should develop better shipping containers, especially for high volume and frequent orders.I have seen containers and methods used to ship highly perishable human organs for transplant. The shipper I believe was Fed X but my memory may be faulty. Reusable ventilated and temp controlled containers would no doubt add significant cost but compared to regularly loosing 100 queens it is probably feasible. Maybe grounds for a joint venture between all the big boys in the industry. We need common cause.
I outlined my experience and made it clear that I seldom buy queens and when I did they came from CA to WA overnight in early summer in good shape. I do pick them up at UPS's first stop in town ( the auto parts store) so as to avoid an all day ride in the van. My place is among the last stops.
A good friend of mine and a much larger operator than I saw this discussion and sent me his experience and asked that I share it. I believe that it adds interesting and reliable information. Here it is.
"Our queen shipping experience last year: shipping CA & HI to CA in early spring: no problem we can see, whether UPS or USPS. Queens arrive in good shape, mostly on time.
Shipping CA & HI to WA in late spring: usually no problem. The best we've found is for UPS to deliver to our home town US Post Office, and USPS calls when they arrive and we pick them up. The local post office folks do that because they know us and are helpful. UPS goes there first, so rather than have them ride in the back of the dark brown hot van until they happen to drive by our place, we have them as soon as they get to town. Sometimes USPS shipments arrive a day late, because they miss a connection or a truck. If they are late, usually they spend an extra day in the regional sorting center, 50 miles away, and sometimes I'll go get them there.
Shipping CA & HI to ND in summer: worse every year. We use about 150 a week, and when a box of 100 arrives dead, it messes up re-queening/dividing. Last summer 6 boxes of 100 arrived dead from heat. Tracing back the route via UPS, they sat for several hours in Louisville, KY on the tarmac. Our queen supplier tells us UPS won't offer insurance, so they were a loss. USPS is a day later than UPS, sometimes two. They almost never arrive calm, always roaring from lack of fresh air/too much heat. I'm thinking about a round-trip place ticket, with an extra ticket on the return for a seatful of queen boxes.
We could be getting better queens from some suppliers than others, and sometimes we do notice differences. We only buy from well-known queen producers. But shipping seems to impose a lowest common denominator on all our purchased queens. Maybe we should run less bees and learn to raise our own queens. Not because our producers don't raise good queens, but because they aren't when we get them. Summer re-queens or divides shouldn't have queens that fail before Christmas, which we are seeing. We're not organized enough to give exact counts on how long each producer's queens last, but we may be soon. But our impression so far is that some shipped queens have reduced longevity compared to established ones. In other words, some re-queened hives get requeened again a few months later."
Paul Hosticka
Dayton WA
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