Are Your Hens Setting On Eggs Yet? 2012 POULT FORECAST - Page 14

Hi all. I have a hen and tom Bronze turkey, both young. First season for the hen to lay eggs and she is laying an egg every day. The tom is strutting and certainly calling a lot, but I haven't seen any breeding going on. I've put a batch of her eggs in the incubator, but I have a feeling that they are not fertile.

Ordered an egg candler and will candle when that arrives but in the meantime, I ordered Eastern Wild/Bronze cross turkey eggs and they just arrived today. They will go into the incubator tomorrow. Looking forward hopefully to some poults from that batch of eggs. I got the eggs on Ebay and the guy who sells them has all kinds of great feedback, including high rate of hatches from the shipped eggs.

Suzanne

I have one bronze hen that wants to go broody... but i won't let her.. I've been hatching out the poults in my Reptipro ..  100% hatch rate and some cute little mutts!

I've been trying to talk her out of it.. but she's determined.. so finally I relented and let her have 8 eggs.. then reconsidered and gave her a total of 12.. I figured if she breaks any (first time broody) that hopefully she will have something at the end of her setting... and if not I'll give her a few poults from the incubator

as you can see.. I'm not her favorite person at the moment... lol

I've hatched out about 15 of my own.  I hatched an additional 16 buff jersey from eggs I bought.  I have another 14 midget whites and 14 of my own in the bator now.  I have hens sitting on about 20 more, but the problem is since they are all trying to set on them, some get uncovered by their fighting.  I've saved some of these from them and finished them in the bator.  I wish I had more broody hen space available to separate them.  Mine have been very nasty to retrieve them, hissing, biting, good thing I use gloves.  I finally found an easy solution  -  I use my husband's golf ball retriever for retrieving the balls out of the water.  It extends from 3 - 5 feet.  Perfect size.  LOL.  They really grab the golf club and try and shake it!  They should be good mother hens if they ever quit shoving each others eggs out of the nest.

Of my 3 girls  we have 10 eggs in the incubator.  There are 2 nests in the pen.  one has 8 eggs and the other has 11 eggs.  I have 2 girls and 1 tom that rotate sitting on the nests.  It amazes me that the tom actually was setting on the next but between the 3 of them the 2 nests constantly have someone sitting on them.  Its my first year with turkeys so will see how things go.