In a few weeks, a California company will be using an HP 3000 to ship thousands of young butterflies a day — deliveries that must be made without delay to ensure that the goods arrive alive.

Insect Lore, based in Shafter, Calif., is one of the top sources of live insects for nature lovers, gardeners and schools. The company ships as many as 5,000 butterfly kits a day to customers around the world in its busy season, beginning in spring. This season will mark the second year those shipments and the company’s mail order operations are managed by an HP 3000.

Jamia Smith has been office manager for the company for nine years, and her duties include managing the HP 3000. After a long experience with using Apple Macintoshes to control distribution, the company installed the Smith-Gardner & Associates’ MACS II software last year along with its first HP 3000.

Smith, who doesn’t profess to be an advanced technical manager of the HP 3000, said the system and the software gave the company its most trouble-free shipping season last year.

“It was the best spring we’ve ever had,” Smith said. “We’ve had a crash every year until now that hindered our production. This year we did have a memory board problem where we were down for about a day. But we didn’t have to re-key anything and we didn’t lose anything. In the past we’ve been down a week in the busy season, and had to go out and buy a typewriter for every operator, then manually type orders and call in credit card verifications. When the computers came back up, all that had to be re-entered in the system.”

Insect Lore’s reduced downtime with the 3000 meant reduced overtime.

“We normally had to pay a lot of money in overtime just because the computers were down,” Smith said. “This year I think we had less than five hours of overtime.”

The 3000 running MACS II is straightforward to manage, Smith added, even with basic technical skills. “We like it,” she said. “I only have the education about computers I’ve been able to learn here, and I’m able to manage the system,” she said. “MACS is really good for us, but we’re a smaller company.”

The 20-user MACS II license had most of the requirements Insect Lore needed for its operations without having to do many modifications. “We keep 20 users on between 5 in the morning and 10 at night,” Smith said.

Insect Lore tried to shift its mail order operations to 15 HP PCs after its Mac solution failed, but the Peachtree solution “kind of hobbled along for six months or so.” The company found the HP 3000 solution at a mail order convention.

With both wholesale and retail operations, the company offers a wide range of products, including live frogs, ants, ladybugs and worms. Customers call 800-LIVE-BUG to order from a printed catalog; the company hopes to have Web-based ordering available soon. The stock of butterflies moves most quickly in the spring, as a staff of 100 breeds, packages and ships the insects in caterpillars’ larvae stage to customers who order from catalogs. A 33-vial kit of caterpillars that will become butterflies is popular with schools, since it provides enough insects for an average science class.

“We have a laboratory on-site where they raise the caterpillars,” Smith said. “We have an artificial diet that the owner of the company, who’s an entomologist, developed. The diet is really the secret to the business, and we go from generation to generation raising caterpillars to butterflies.”

Most butterflies travel in either caterpillar or chrysalis stage, although a few travel as butterflies. Customers can order butterflies for weddings, for example, and the insects are shipped as a chrysalis that is placed in an included pyramid to emerge 2-3 days after receipt. Butterflies’ entire lifespan is only 2 to 14 days on average, so timely shipping of the Insect Lore inventory is crucial.

That makes the HP 3000’s reliability vital to keeping the company’s distribution of mail-order goods flowing. “There wasn’t a software package we could find on the Macintosh that was large enough to handle our mail-order business,” Smith said. “We send out 1,000 of the student kits a day, as well as books, videos and puzzles for science curriculum.”