Incubators Anonymous

Welcome everyone to incubators anonymous! Please introduce yourselves and tell us about your incubation addiction, how long you've been dealing with your addiction and what you are doing about it. I'll start!

Hi, my name is Jess and I'm a chronic incubator. I have a GQF 1202 cabinet bator with more eggs than I even know in it. I also have a hova bator with 30 eggs in lockdown in it. At the moment, I have 2 brooders full of peeping babies with more due to hatch soon. There are no signs of stopping either as I have over 60 eggs sitting on the counter, waiting to go in. At the moment, our flock consists of 26 adult chickens and 7 adult turkeys.

Update from 2020...I no longer know exactly how many chickens I have anymore but I think it's somewhere between 50-70 lol. Turkeys are up to 15 just because I just love those big feathered dogs! My incubation addiction has clearly not improved over the years!

My name is Sonja and I have 3 incubators but currently only one running at the moment. I have 3 dozen quail eggs in it. I have a Brinsea 20 octogon advanced and two Hovabators 1588. I hatch off and on. As far as my flock goes, I have a small flock of gold laced cochin bantams. I have LF double laced black Barnevelders and I also have 7 buff brahma bantams all in the brooder. fter my quail hatch, Ill start hatching out some more baby chicks. Chickens are an addiction

Hi, I am one of them also..

I have a 1202 also, I am not sure how many eggs I have in it today. I know I put 103 in on Sunday.

I have some hatching on the 11th. I also have three turning trays on the countertop, I have them a little less than a 1/3 full of eggs to go in this coming weekend.

I have three foam incubators I use as hatchers. I have a batch hatching right, I have three cages in the house with chicks in it. I think I have around 30 chicks in the house today. I also have a brooder setup in one of my sheds, Ok, I really have two set up, but only one has chicks in it right now.

I have 9 breeding pens/coops set up with birds in them right now. I will have 4 more set up this weekend.

If any of you need help with your addiction, I can teach you to control it like I do.

Hi Sonja! Chickens have to be one of the greatest addictions, especially once you start hatching them lol. I know I can't stop

Lol, I was hoping you'd come over Ralph. I honestly have no clue how many are in my bator. I don't want to count either because then I'll worry about where to put them all!

oh no, I forgot to mention my flock, I have a bunch of layers. I am not sure how many, around 20 I think. I have 3 Partridge chantilers I breed, I have EE I breed 3 of them. I have 9 Cream legbars AKA Creamettes, I breed.

I have a breeding trio of Speckled Sussex. BTW I hatched 3 of them out today but I sold them before they were a day old. I have a BA rooster I use to breed 3 BA hens and 1 Black EE. I have a CX/Rainbow cross Rooster I use to breed meat birds with a CX hens and a CX/rainbow hen. These are called toads.


I have 11 turkey hens and 6 Toms. I have them in breeding pens to control the color choices I get. I am getting a TOM to visit and lend some of my Turkey hens his sperm.

I think that is it....

NO wait, I have two roosters with my layers, One is a EE with blue egg gene, the other is a EE/Creamette cross.. Both hie parents have the blue egg gene also.


There I think I got it all.

Auroradream26 said:

Lol, I was hoping you'd come over Ralph. I honestly have no clue how many are in my bator. I don't want to count either because then I'll worry about where to put them all!

Click to expand...

I know I have less than 200-225 cause I still have some room left.

haha brilliant! What do you do with/ where do you sell them all?
I have 4 incubators - I only use 3 . A Brinsea 40 (love it), an old metal one, and an old polystyrene one as a hatcher.
I am suffering at the moment because we are going away in March for a week so I have not been able to put any eggs in my bators until I come back (I don't trust the person who will be house/ animal sitting to keep them going properly - control freak me? no of course not) and I didn't want her to have to look after chicks.
I will be incubating turkey poults, and many many chicks when I get back drool.....

My addiction is mainly turkeys and guineas but since it is really too early for them I have to rely on chicken eggs. Today joining the 12 Bourbon turkey eggs in the cabinet incubator are 150 chicken eggs.

There are 48 white leghorn eggs (fertilized by a cream legbar rooster) destined to be Sapphires that will lay blue eggs. Another 23 are from Rose Comb Brown Leghorns that are in with the same Cream Legbar rooster. These should produce legbar looking chicks with rose combs and the hens should lay blue eggs except that one of the hen's eggs seem to have a slight brown tinge to them and those may well produce green eggs.

There are also 32 eggs from Sapphires bred to the same legbar rooster and these will grow into blue egg producers. Then come the 33 pure breed Welsummers and 14 eggs from my White Laced Red Cornish/Light Brahma cross hen who was stuck in with the Welsummer rooster.

I have had my cabinet incubator since the late 1980s and finally broke down and bought a cabinet hatcher last year.

Just waiting for the turkeys and guineas to start laying to further feed my addiction.

Have fun everyone.

Lately, I've been saving everything that just gives me a reason to hatch. Any blue egg because it'll make either blue or green egg layers, which everyone loves and if they're from my cream legbars, then they'll be sex linked. Every chocolate egg from my Marans because they'll be olive eggers, and every rhodebar egg because they'll be sex linked lol.

All my birds are running together right now so I haven't been hatching a lot of chicks up until now unless by request and surprisingly, I ended up with orders for about 30 chicks lol. Now, with the hatch a long, I'm setting them all!

But the poults have been my big thing so far this year. My girls started laying in December and I've incubated almost every egg. Every poult that I've hatched has sold so fast, I even had to make a waiting list and had 3 weeks of hatches sold out in advance for a while lol. Now, one of my turkeys is broody and another is thinking about it so the egg flow has really slowed down but it's time to hatch chicks!

And those are all for sale! I have a bunch in the bators for myself too lol. Not sure where they're all going to go, but I'll find room somewhere lol