Pekin Ducks Hatching!! Need Advice please

[Keah]

Hi,

So i have 13 duck eggs in my bator. It was hatch date yesterday and two of them started pipping. When i got home (night) i saw there were ants over the two eggs that had started pipping!! So i quickly moved the incubator from downstairs to upstairs and i HAD to open the incubator or the poor babies would've died. now i can still hear them chirping away and they are still kickin! but by doing this i had to open the incubator. What is the chance the other eggs are not going to hatch? i added warm sponges to the incubator to get the humidity up fast and that seemed to work. BUT with the two eggs with ants on, i had to hold one and every time an ant came out of the crack i had to grab it and kill it! It was horrible as all these ants kept coming out of this poor babies shell. SO FAR NO MORE ANTS THOUGH. i am just super worried about my other ducklings, i really hope they are okay.

Can anyone offer any advice, about the ants and hatching? it would be greatly appreciated as this is my first hatch.

 

[quackingdom]

I had the same problem, with ants getting in my eggs as they hatched. I found that the babies were stuck in a too-wet, sticky yellow membrane, caused by too-high humidity – and that's what the ants were after. I had to assist, because the ducklings were stuck in the membrane. One duckling died from the ants. I did the same thing you did – killing every ant that came out. I had two batches at the time, one under a broody mom and one in the incubator. There were no ants in the incubator, only in the eggs under the mom.


I'm not an expert on hatching, but I would suggest looking into the eggs to be sure they don't have the sticky membrane stuck on them.

 

[Keah]

Great news!!
The two ducks that had the ants on them hatched last night! one around 10pm. and the other I'm not sure. I was asleep hehe. Ants are all gone and two more ducks have pipped. I am very happy. they are healthy little ducks.
Thanks for your help, its good to know its not just my eggs some ant are after. sorry to hear one died though. Very sad.