14 hours of light for egglaying - myth?

[ChickenUnionOrganizer]

Two of my pullets began laying in December. Our shortest length of daylight was 9 hrs., 16 minutes. We are now up to 9 hrs, 20 minutes. After recovering from a moult, the Barred Rock is laying again. There's one older hen that is not laying. So, 3 out of 4 is good.

They don't receive supplemental light. I'm relatively new to chickens, so I find the 16 hrs. of daylight for eggs a bit confusing. Anyhow, that's my story and I'm stickin' to it!

 

[Hogs and Horns]

I got my first hens (Red Sex-links) on Christmas morning, so I'm very new to all this fascinating chicken stuff. A daughter bought the girls from a feed store, where they had lived indoors in a pen with artificial lighting during the store's business hours. The girls gave me two eggs in two days, on Christmas and the 26th, but there has been nothing since then. They get daylight from about 7 am until nearly 5:30 pm. I'm guessing that the lack of eggs since the 26th is likely due to the shortened amount of light the girls have had since leaving the feed store and joining our family. Could this be a reasonable assumption or are there other factors I am missing? Thank you for any responses you give!!!

 

[DMRippy]

Before I moved all my layers to the new breeding I had lights that came on at 2:30 am. My egg were down to 2-3 a day from 15+ layers. Once I added the lights with in a week I got 13 eggs for the first time. Now they are in the breeding pens with no lights, I am luck to get 1 egg a pen

If it were not for the new pullets starting to lay I would be only getting 5 eggs a day. I think the lights help. May not work miracles but it helps. A good diet helps too. I try to keep my chicks under lights for at least 14 hours a day. I think it helps them grow.

 

[Wisher1000]

Quote:
Hello and

I think your hens may also be reacting to the changes they are experiencing, farm to feedstore, feedstore, to your family. Sometimes something as simple as cleaning out the coop will make mine slow down on egg production for a couple of weeks, and as Farmboy said, it takes several days to weeks to result in a change in egg production. Give your girls a couple of weeks to adjust and then start looking at what is typical for them. Good luck and enjoy your new chickens....

 

[Hogs and Horns]

What kinds of lights do you use? Have you found that some types work better than others or does it matter?

 

[Hogs and Horns]

Quote:
Hello and

I think your hens may also be reacting to the changes they are experiencing, farm to feedstore, feedstore, to your family. Sometimes something as simple as cleaning out the coop will make mine slow down on egg production for a couple of weeks, and as Farmboy said, it takes several days to weeks to result in a change in egg production. Give your girls a couple of weeks to adjust and then start looking at what is typical for them. Good luck and enjoy your new chickens....

Thanks for your insights. I bought the same feed that the girls were fed at the feed store, but this is quite an adjustment for them. I don't think they'd ever seen a ramp because it took them awhile to learn how to go out of their coop each morning. They still have no clue how to go back in, so I have to pick each one up and put her back in the coop for the night. Poor dears don't understand what's going on.

 

[Cowgirl75446]

I use lights in my new chickens barn, the timers are set to come on at 4:00 am. - 8:00 am. each day. I have a 32 X 24 X 8 barn and I use 5 Energy Smart Spiral 60 Watt Bulbs. It produces a lot of light, I have the lights right above my pens, I have 2 lights on one side for 6 pens and 3 lights on the other side for 8 pens. My pullets in the new chicken barn are laying great, I have 14 separate pens in that barn. I also have 2 pens in the front yard that I am not using lights in, the pullets out there are the same age as the ones in the new barn, I am not getting any eggs from them right now. So I think the lights do make a lot of difference.

 

[Tracydr]

Light takes at least two weeks to start working and only a few days to stop working if taken away. One night with a burned out lamp can mess up the whole program. Some say even a few hours of the light burned out can mess things up.
You need enough light to read a newspaper in all parts of the coop easily but it doesn't need to be a bright light. You should select a light with all of the "warm" parts of the spectrum, not a "cool" lightbulb. I use a single, fluorescent bulb of the warm spectrum on a timer that turns on at sunset since I don't want my rooster crowing at 3 in the morning. I use a timer that senses dusk so that it automatically changes with day length, which is really handy. I can just set the amount of hours after dusk that I want it to stay on and every so often, as the days get longer, reset the timer to adjust for the longer hours in the spring.
I light my chickens. They are livestock for me,not pets. Plus, in AZ, they take a break in summer from the heat, they don't need another break in winter because of light.
I learned quite a lot about lighting and animals not only from my college classes in Animal Science but also from showing horses. We use lights to keep them from growing winter coats and to bring broodmares into heat. One night with the lights messed up can spoil months of work, making the animal think it's the beginning of winter and resetting their internal clock. Many animals are sensitive to lights. Sheep, horses, chickens. I'm not sure about cattle, i suspect they are. Humans are also effected, which is why we can become more depressed in the winter. I suspect there are more things that happen in our bodies related to daylight hours that researchers haven't found, yet, since endocrinology is a fairly young and complicated field.
The part of the brain that's effected is the pituitary.

 

[silkiechicken]

Most studies on poultry are on commercial leghorns under 2 years that live in humidity temp controled barns. That said, almost everything has circadian rythms... a model some of my cohort are using to study it is a fungus, Neurospora crassa to be exact.