The hens run free during the day, at night they turn to coop. Before this happened last year with the same hen and I followed her and found a bunch of eggs. Now she is not hiding them, she doesn't act like she does when she is laying eggs. Notthing traumatic has happened, no molt, good diet and health. Other hens are laying normally. She does seem to however be sitting on other eggs and acting a bit broody. Is this broody behavior and will she go back to laying eggs? Thanks in advance. :/
I think she may be broody...there are ways to break a broody hen, but I usually love having new chicky babies, and so I order some fertile eggs, or put some of my own under her. She will start laying eggs again once she has either been broken of her broodiness, or has hatched out chicks and raised them to the age that they become independent.
If she's spending the days and nights on a nest and not laying, she's probably broody.
You can either give her fertile eggs to hatch or break her of her broodiness so she'll go back to laying sooner.
I use a wire dog crate to break broodies, has worked great twice so far(on the same bird).
A waterer was added shorty after taking this pic.
My experience went like this: After her setting for 3 days and nights in the nest, I put her in a wire dog crate with smaller wire on the bottom but no bedding, set up on a couple of 4x4's right in the coop and I would feed her some watered down crumble a couple times a day.
I let her out a couple times a day and she would go out into the run, drop a huge turd, race around running, take a vigorous dust bath then head back to the nest... at which point I put her back in the crate. Each time her outings would lengthen a bit, eating, drinking and scratching more and on the 3rd afternoon she stayed out of the nest and went to roost that evening...event over, back to normal tho she didn't lay for another week or two.
