Day 20 and No pip :(

[ChickenMom08]

Today is day 20, and none have pipped. My eggs went into the bator Feb 22..humidity has been at 40-50%.
Icandled at day 17 have 9 eggs...8 we saw movements before lock down

Am I being to impatient?

 

[sumi]

Welcome to BYC

I've had an entire hatch under a broody hen (you don't get more optimal than that) start on day 22 only. As Ridgerunner said above, the 21 days timeframe is a guide only. The majority of chicken eggs hatch after roughly 21 days, but that said, I've had them hatch on days 18, 19, 21, 22, 23 and 25. Patience!

Good luck with your hatch!

 

[Ridgerunner]

That 21 day thing is just a guideline. If everything is exactly right then the eggs will hatch somewhere around 21 days after you start them in the incubator. But there are a lot of things that can make a chick hatch early or late; heredity, humidity, how or how long the eggs were stored, or just basic differences in the eggs themselves. A really big factor is average incubating temperature. If the average temperature is too warm even by a small amount, hatch can be early, If t is a bit low, hatch can be late, maybe by two or three days.

Yes it is too early to worry. Patience is your friend, hard as that can be. Good luck!

 

[Ridgerunner]

That’s a hard question and different people will give you different answers. As long as they have not pipped I’d suggest about day 23 you do the float test. Take any unpipped egg and put it in a bowl of still lukewarm water. If anything is alive in there the egg will wiggle on its own. If it stays dead still, well sorry. If the egg has external pipped, obviously you cannot do this.

If one wiggles you could put it back in the incubator a little longer. It could still hatch on its own. There are some threads on here about assisting a hatch but I don’t have a link.

One problem with assisting a hatch is that the chick has to be ready to hatch or you will kill it. It needs to have absorbed the yolk, dried up blood vessels outside its body and absorbed that blood, and learned to breathe air instead of living in a liquid environment. If you try to help before it is ready you take a big chance of it bleeding to death or just dying. It’s not a good position to be in.

 

[1muttsfan]

I would also suggest day 23. If your temp was a little cool it may take a little longer.

Here is a Learning Center article by Sumi about diagnosing incubation problems

https://www.backyardchickens.com/a/egg-failure-to-hatch-diagnosing-incubation-problems

While it is discouraging when a hatch fails, don't let it stop you from trying again, it is great fun. And whether your hatch is successful or not it is a great learning experience for kids - the excitement of hatching, or how to handle the discouragement when things don't go as hoped.

 

[sumi]

Perfectly normal.

Once they are ready the chicks start the hatching process by pipping into the air cell, so they can breathe. You may be able to see this if you candle the eggs. After this, what we call "internal pip", they will start absorbing the yolk, which will sustain them for up to 3 days after the hatch and the blood vessels in the internal membrane that breathed for the chick until then, will start retracting. This whole process, from internal pip to hatched, can take up to 30 hours, though a normal hatch usually progresses quicker.

The chick will keep breathing in the air pocket until it needs more oxygen and will then pip through the shell, "external pip". This usually happens after about 6-7 hours, though I've had internal pipes take longer to progress. I've often not seen any sign of life in the incubator until the external pips started appearing. Some chicks will wiggle and you may even hear them cheep in the shells before they pip externally. After the external pip the chicks will wait out the absorption process, which, as I said takes a few hours, so don't worry if it seems they are "stuck", it's a slow process. When they are ready to complete the hatch they will zip the shells open and emerge fully. Leave them in there for awhile so they can recover and dry off before putting them in the brooder.

 

[WalnutHill]

The foam incubators have a few things you need to watch for.

Sanitation: the more you use them, the dirtier they get. And as they get older, the foam gets more porous and harder to clean. Most chemicals are either really bad for eggs, really bad for foam, or both. I wash mine with antibacterial dish soap, a soft brush, and plenty of hot water...then spray with peroxide...then dry in the sun.

Humidity: the foam incubators tend to be WAY more humid than they need to be, especially if you follow the instructions that come with them. If your humidity in the incubator is over 25 or 30%, try dry incubation (no water added until lockdown). This will help fight bacteria, fungus, and yeast growth.

Eggs: dirty eggs in a foam incubator introduce contaminants. Washing eggs makes them more susceptible to contaminants. Use clean eggs, scraping off dry matter. Handle with gloves or clean hands.

Temperature: while small incubators do have thermostats, they are also very sensitive to temperature fluctuations due to environmental temperatures, opening and closing, and top misalignment. The solid state "knob" type thermostats of the LG 9200 seem to be the most sensitive to environmental changes, but the most reliable for recovering after a power outage. And they do have hot spots in the middle and cold spots in the corner. The fan design doesn't help too much.

Ventilation: these incubators are efficient because they are very well insulated by the nature of the material, and have an interlocking lip design. While good for saving power and retaining heat, these characteristics also lead to poor air exchange. Eggs are living, breathing organisms and need clean, fresh air.

I hatched dozens of chicks in 2 foam incubators last year (LG 9200). But I enhanced performance with a digital thermostat with remote probe and just left the incubator's thermostat knob turned up to "always on". After the second back to back set of eggs, the LG developed a funky smell that wouldn't go away after cleaning and airing. Then I learned about dry incubation, and things started improving. While the temps were much more steady with the external controllers, I still found them not suitable for hatching LOTS of eggs so I built my cabinet.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Any incubator needs to be cleaned after use. Some stain doesn’t hurt. The risk comes from leaving stuff in there that microbes can grow in and infest the eggs.

Humidity is something with any incubator you have to get right. The professionals using the incubators that hold 60,000 eggs at a time have learned that it has to be tweaked to get maximum hatch rate. Different incubators do best with different humidity rates and where they are located or the time of year may make a difference too. Even if one of those commercial incubators is just moved to a different part of the same room they have to relearn it to get the best hatch rates. Different temperatures and moisture levels in the air at the intake can make a difference, maybe because of the location of the room air vents. They tweak the incubators by opening the unhatched eggs. You can look through these troubleshooting articles to try to understand what may be going wrong with the incubation but it is not always easy to figure out what went wrong. With eggs developing to the pip stage but not pipping it could be too high or too low humidity during incubation, too high or too low average incubating temperature, improper turning, lack of good fresh air ventilation, and I’m sure things I’ve forgotten. In general if the egg stops developing in the first week of incubation it’s because of something that happened before the egg went into the incubator. If they stop developing during the last week it’s generally something to do with incubation. Nor always, but generally.

Mississippi State Incubation Troubleshooting
http://msucares.com/poultry/reproductions/trouble.html

Illinois Incubation troubleshooting
http://urbanext.illinois.edu/eggs/res24-00.html

Dirty eggs can be a problem in any incubator. So can handling the eggs if you get them dirty, such as having dirty, wet, or oily hands. You might remove some of that protective layer of bloom that helps stop bacteria from going in through the porous shell or you may introduce bacteria from dirty hands. Always wash and dry your hands before handling the eggs. The problem is that if microbes get inside the eggs they will grow whether there is a developing chick in there or not. They will kill any developing chick and can really make a mess with the rotten egg smell or even leak or explode. I don’t know how bad that smell was but if it had a rotten egg smell this might have something to do with it. If it is just a light unpleasant smell, probably not.

Temperature is an important variable. Too high and the chicks can be malformed or even cooked. They can be way early too. If the average incubation temperature is too low they can be late or the chicks can be fairly big and mushy, not strong enough to hatch. Too high a humidity can do this too. As long as you don’t get too extreme for very long a temperature drop or peak isn’t always a death knell. The eggs are a lot denser than air so it takes a long time for the interior of the egg to change significantly and the eggs are pretty tough to that kind of variation. Still, variations in the internal egg temperature are not good, whether when storing the eggs before incubation starts or after incubation starts. A steady internal egg temperature is a good thing. One good thing about temperature and humidity is that you don’t have to be spot on to get a decent hatch. There is a fairly wide range of humidity and temperature where you can do OK, but the closer you are to ideal the better off you are. This range is why I’m not convinced humidity is your real problem, temperature possible but not necessarily so.

Not all eggs are identical either. Some have different porosity, different eggs may have different consistencies of the egg white (some are thicker than others), some may have lost more humidity during storage, sometimes relative size can have an effect. What may be a perfect temperature and humidity for one egg may not be all that good for another. You cannot be perfect for every egg, you have to try to find that balance that works for most of the eggs.

Any decent incubator, whether foam or other, has pretty good insulation. They need to be used right, things like setting them up where there is not a lot of outside temperature change, breezes or sunlight hitting them, putting the lids back on correctly, and opening the vents. There are some studies that show poor air exchange is actually good for the eggs during the first week of incubation, but after that they need fresh air. The developing chick inside is a living animal and needs to breathe in oxygen and get rid of excess carbon dioxide. The egg shells are porous so oxygen can come in and carbon dioxide can go out. Before it internal pips that exchange is through its blood but after it internal pips it is through direct breathing. The plugs need to be out. A forced air is set up to redistribute the air that is in the incubator already but should also bring in fresh air through the vents, but a still air with the plugs out should do a decent job. If you still had the plugs in, this is one that is could be a cause of your problems.

Some incubators are lemons, that can happen with about anything you get; cars, blenders, or incubators. Some are harder to use than others, whether that involves tweaking or how much you need to monitor them. You need to calibrate any instruments you use, thermometers or hygrometers, to assure you are getting good readings. That’s a real common problem on this forum, instruments don’t work right. If you read the instructions that came with the incubator, you should see a statement to not try to hatch expensive eggs the first time. That’s because a lot of them do need tweaking or you need to go through a learning curve to get things right.

You don’t have to open all the eggs that did not hatch, but opening the eggs to see what went wrong is how the professionals tweak their incubators to maximize hatch rates. They want to know what may have gone wrong before the egg went into the incubator or what went wrong after it went into the incubator. A normal hatch rate for eggs they put in their incubators is about 90%. Half the problems normally come about because of something that happened before incubation started and about half after incubation started. If they have 6,000 unhatched eggs they won’t open all of them, but they will do a representative sample. If they don’t how do they know what to correct?

With the air cells about the right size I’m not too concerned about your humidities. From your post the air cells were at the top of the eggs when they were in the incubator so you probably did not incubate them upside down. That can lead to really bad hatches, often but not always total failures. Your temperatures may have been too low. Maybe you can get a clue to that from looking at the unhatched chicks. If the yolk is not absorbed or they are underdeveloped that may be a cause. The smell you mentioned bothers me some, but I’d think poor ventilation as a possible cause. It could be something totally different. It’s really hard to tell from this side of the internet.

The guy that had five of your eggs and only one hatched pretty late, how did the other eggs he had in with them perform? Were they late as well? Did he open your eggs to see if they even developed? I’ve had extremely poor hatches from eggs I got from someone near here when I brought them home on a really rough country without good padding, but those eggs never even started to develop. Handling may have played a part in your four, though I’d like to know how other eggs did in that incubation.

I am really sorry you did not get any to hatch. That’s especially hard when you have a young child involved.

 

[1muttsfan]

Yes, too soon to worry

 

[ChickenMom08]

Alright thanks lol my heart is set for at least 1 to hatch...however I don't have my brooder set up either lol...