Caught my hens drinking egg , now what!?

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silkielover88

silkielover88

Chirping
5 Years
Apr 21, 2014
270
16
93
Addison NY
So we have been trying to figure out why we have egg shells in the best boxes, we clean them and add new bedding every night. We have golf balls in there, but it never fails, the next day boxes are empty and full of egg shells. Today we caught 2 hens "drinking" from the inside of the egg!!!! Why!? And how do we fix this!? They get layer feed, oyster shells, and a scratch grain. Water gets changed and cleaned everyday, and we just got nutriena feather fixer, it has more protein than the layer. We mixed the feed tonight....any other ideas? Suggestions?
 
No more scratch grains, and boost the protein content of their feed. Leave a few ceramic dummy eggs in the boxes at all times. Satisfying their craving for protein and leaving 'unbreakable' eggs out all day for them to peck at, without getting any reward, may be enough to solve the problem if you caught it early enough.
 
Are the shells very thin/ fragile? If they break easily, everyone will eat the contents. Do the birds have outside time, or are they confined in a small coop? If the food issues are fixed, and the problem continues, you may have one (I hope) bad egg eater, who's breaking the eggs on purpose, and will have to move on. Go out to the coop as often as possible, to find the culprit, and collect the eggs as often as possible. Mary
 
Issue was fixed...we got feather fixer feed and porcelain eggs. Works like a charm! I just gotta keep moving and switching out the fake eggs ever week....they know...they will push them out of the nest if I don't switch the eggs around
 
Get ceramic eggs. They will peck at those and get nothing.they sell them at feed stores. Also take whole eggs still in shell, put them in blender, and cook them scrambled eggs. That worked for me. Another suggestion (which I have never done) is to put some kind of spicy mustard in an egg and let a chick eat it. I heard that works. If none of this works then cull it or sell the bird to someone who can collect eggs every hour.
 

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