Bantam surrogate and Low hatch rate why?

[firefowl]

About 16-18 days ago I put at least 4 quail eggs under a broody bantam and today I found only 2 quail eggs and about 10 chicken eggs under her. One of the quail eggs was partially hatched but squashed and dead, the other one wasn't hatched. I removed all the chicken eggs and replaced with more quail eggs. So the question is why did she smother or kill the quail that tried to hatch?

I've been using a cheap small incubator to hatch quail eggs for the second time. And the results I'm getting are the same as the 1st time - one hatched out of nine. I've been turning 1-2 times per day and the temp was a steady 100oF. I had no humidity meter so just guessed when it needed some water in the tray. In both cases after the first one hatched it kicked around all the other eggs - could this stop them from hatching? When I removed the hatched one I moved the eggs carefully to be more spaced out.

Eggs were incubated on 2nd Dec 8pm so it's been 18 days. One was already hatched when I woke up today

 

[Altfrizzle]

What kind of quail? Bobwhite take longer.

I wonder if she knew it wasn't a chicken egg?

I imagine in your incubator the problem was humidity, since you had no way to measure and just guessed.

 

[firefowl]

Coturnix.The humidity was ok for that one to hatch...

Will be day 19 in a few hours, still only one hatch. The other thing I realised I didn't do was to keep the eggs with the aircell facing up.

I've given up on hatching quail eggs under my hen, I bought some fertile olive egger and maran eggs I will put under her today.

Also I just bought 10x day old quails so the one that hatched won't be lonely.