Snail mail is not passé in the United States and postmen still deliver them house to house.

Around the month of May, US mailboxes hold more than the usual letters that may puzzle people. One postal worker advises them to leave the “thing” there.

A Reddit discussion on the thing explains why the scented dryer sheet used to make laundry smell fresh and eliminate fabric static are placed inside mailboxes. The purpose is to keep wasps from hanging out inside the mailboxes and sting unsuspecting mail carriers and recipients, New York Post (NYP) reports.

“We’ve found that they hate scented dryer sheets,” the aforementioned letter carrier revealed, according to NYP. “If we encounter a box that is a problem for nests, we’ll often put one sheet in there and it does the trick.”

Meanwhile, a British fisherman’s note found on Sweden’s west coast by two friends in February has been returned to the sender in the United Kingdom.

BBC Scotland News (BSN) helped finders Ellinor Rosen Eriksson and Asa Nilsson identify the writer of the faded letter inside a bottle that washed up on the shore of the Vaderoarna Islands.

BSN traced the sender, James Addison Runcie, to the fishing village of Cullen in Banffshire, Scotland.

BSN reporter Ken Banks learned that Runcie, who died in 1995, and crewmate Gavin Geddes put a message in a bottle and tossed it from the fishing boat Loraley in 1978.

Geddes, 69, said he wrote the message himself and was amazed the bottle was found after 47 years of bobbing in the North Sea, BBC reports.

Runcie’s sister, Sandra Taylor, 83, was also stunned, calling the finding of the message in a bottle in Sweden “unbelievable,” according to BBC.