if your going to have eggs shipped, try to order them from a neighboring state. my personal experience as an egg shipper tells me that my own eggs, once they cross the Mississippi river, do not hatch well at all. i have also noticed if i order eggs from over 350-400 miles away the hatch rates drop dramatically.
ozexpat is probably the closest to an expert i have found on shipping eggs. he ships and transports eggs frequently.
going by legend, the USPS has better climate control, UPS and Fedex in the summer months will be very hard (hot) on eggs. again this is just hearsay and i cannot personally vouch for this.
the best method i can find on shipping eggs is to put them in a wooden box (padded well of course) and put the wooden box inside a cardboard box for shipping purposes. as mentioned above, do not label them fragile - teenagers and young people who load those trucks see that as a joke.
Shipped eggs are a crap shoot. a few fun facts
USPS uses fedex to move their priority mail across the country. Except for a few major road routes like Sacramento to Los Angeles on the 5 freeway, anything over about 300 miles goes on a plane to Memphis then on another plane to its destination. Its not really about distance. Some of my best hatches have come from Florida.
Postal workers only handle the boxes for the first and last few hundred feet of the route. Mega-automated machines look at the barcodes, and throw the packages onto conveyor belts. If my 70lb box is below your box of eggs in the bin, its landing on top of your eggs on the belt. This means that for most of the journey, whether you pack them upright or sideways, or if you mark fragile on the box does not mean squat.
Putting do not x-ray on the box is a waste of time. Most packages will never be x-rayed and do you think if the post office was on high alert they would not xray because you asked them nicely? So did the terrorist? Even if they did xray - the dose is so small on an airport scanner it wont effect eggs.
So what kills the embryos when you ship eggs.
- large or violent hits from boxes dropping or something being dropped on to them - causes egg breakages and broken aircells (get your local eggs and try to dislodge an aircell - its pretty hard.
- vibration. The blastoderm that will become the embryo is attached to the wall of the egg by very small "strings" that get broken
- temperature we all know an egg can be hatched after 10 days - but thats when its stored in a room at 55-60F.
- Pressure - planes are pressurized to between 8 and 10,000 feet. Next time you fly, fill a balloon up ro the size of a canteloupe before you take off. It will be a watermelon at 10000feet. The bigger the aircell (older the egg) the more saddled the air cell will become.
So how do you mitigate loss.
1. double box this provides protection from the hard hits.
2. pack ehhs so they cannot move but they have shock absorption. I like pipe insulation as the cheapest and most effective way. Foam inserts are good but they cannot be too tight or they eggs will break from being squeezed when they get the first hard jolt. Bubble wrap is next but the eggs gave to have enough support in the box so they donet move around.
3 Avoid shipping in peak of summer and dead of winter.
buy local if you can
buy nearby if you cant
or
think about overnight shipping. you pay 3-5 or more dollars per egg - say 42 bucks for a dozen. add 15 bucks for priority shipping, you get 4 to hatch. thats almost 15 bucks a chick. double shipping and get 6 to hatch and its 12 bucks a chick. its worth a thought.
I dont overnight but I hold shippers accountable for their product, If packaging sucks I let them know. if the package is crap and I get breakage with leaking onto eggs i demand a full refund.
good luck
