6th Annual BYC New Year's Day 2015 Hatch-A-Long

[Cynthia12]

So I was going to also set some olive eggs but I thought that hen had stopped laying on me. Only today we found not one, but two nests of sneaky chicken eggs of a few different kinds!

I was thinking..wow, pretty trees. So I looked at where you are from. GA. Our son just got back from a mission there..2 yrs. gone..he's here for the holidays this year! Whoot!
Fun that you found some extra eggs. Did that this summer for the first time..a sneaky little leghorn .. found nine of her eggs..I was wondering what is going on..looked and looked, but not in the right place until she heard me come out in the morning, and wanted treats, and out she pops from behind a tarp we had covering some of DH equipment. 9 eggs! Little stink. Had to make sure she was in the run for a few days until she got back into the good habit.

Oh, what part of GA are you in? He was in Sandy Springs the last part. He's been way down south, then up north.

 

[Aliciahess]

I picked up some batteries while I was out today and snapped a few pics of my incubator. The handle is my semi-auto turner. I can turn all the trays at once without opening the incubator. The funnel and tube puts water in my top pan. I still haven't figured out the best placement for other water trays. The egg trays are ugly, and I'm not happy with them. But I plan to make better ones as soon as I can. Checked the 18 eggs that were questionable at day 7 and culled 15 of them. 7 of them were clears (I'm guessing infertile) and the other 8 were very early quitters. Not too bad considering I've got massive molting going on, I JUST went back to FF a week before starting to gather them, and a bunch of them are young pullet eggs. So I was expecting some pretty heavy cull numbers.

Was just reading the first couple of posts for this. Great incubator the way!! Got a good laugh out of bamadude "adult protection thingys" to regulate bator temp. Lmao!!

 

[Cynthia12]

Love it!

 

[Dish chickens]

Hey, sorry I missed your post. The Incubation Worksheet is meant to be used with a spreadsheet, however I have not got the entire spreadsheet done yet which is intended to make all areas of chicken management...manageable. LOL

I am using OpenOffice and as far as I know, it can be opened with Excel. I would be interested to find out.

If you'd like the spreadsheet as is, pm me with your email address and I can send it to you. Please do not post email or other personal data in here.

Thank you
I went ahead and made an excel sheet with the same info on it last night. I couldn't get the PDF file to save or transfer to the excel sheet. All is good now and thank you for the time you put in to the spreadsheet.

 

[Cynthia12]

 

[Peep_Show]

I would think crack them open outside cuz they probly stink stink stink?

Plastic ziplock bags are great for eggtopsy of any egg, stinky or not.

Not a fun job. I have hatched once before and couldn't bring myself to open the eggs. Is it really that beneficial to open them?

Sometimes you'd be surprised at what you find. If you go to www.brinsea.com on the left-hand margin they have their incubation handbook for downloading. In it is a most-helpful index of eggtopsy results cause and effects. You'd be surprised at what humidity problems can do to your embryos!

Last hatch I had a bunch of last minute (Day 19/20) quitters. Turns out it was oxygen deprivation due to hatching sea-level eggs at a high altitude (pores are not conducive to thin mountain air). Had I not done an eggtopsy I would've wondered when they quit and not been able to figure it out... BYC provided the other clues as to what all happened. I also found one egg with a malformation (open brain) which had the cause and effect listed in the handbook. Hopefully never have to see that again!

 

[Aliciahess]

Thanks for the site. Have saved and will begin research. Off to bed now...have a good night all.

 

[Roan]

Thank you
I went ahead and made an excel sheet with the same info on it last night. I couldn't get the PDF file to save or transfer to the excel sheet. All is good now and thank you for the time you put in to the spreadsheet.

Not a problem. I'm just glad I can contribute!
I didn't think the pdf file would tansfer to excel. What I meant was the pdf is basically a copy of a spreadsheet that I made on OpenOffice which (from my understanding) would import to Excel.

The Incubation Worksheet is only one spreadsheet of a complete Chicken Farm Management Spreadsheet Suite. I think I may have posted an overview of what the suite will entail in here before but if not, here goes:

Here is a breakdown of what the suite will be able to do when I've finished with it:

Some functions of this suite are:

1. Egg Journal
   1. Recording daily egg collection
   2. Maintaining a running average of eggs laid per day, week, month and year
2. Expense Journal
   1. Record daily expenses
   2. Maintain a running tabulation of expenses including average expenses and total expenses for day, week, month and year
3. Sales Journal
   1. Record egg, meat, adult and chick sales
   2. Maintain a running tabulation of sales per each category including average expenses and total expenses for day, week, month and year
4. Incubation Worksheet
   1. Record individual records for separate flocks and/or incubators
   2. Maintain a running tabulation incubator records
5. Coop Design
   1. Calculate total footage of individual chicken houses based on desired square footage per bird
   2. Calculate dimensions for individual chicken houses based on square footage per bird and desired width or length of each house
6. Customer Record Keeping
   1. Tracking customer purchasing trends
   2. Maintaining customer contact information

Other sheets and/or functions may be added later.

I made a similar Custemer Record Keeping sheet before and with it, I was able to track how many eggs an individual customer purchased and when they reached an increment of 20 dozen, I threw in a free dozen as a thank you.

 

[Dish chickens]

The bigger chick in my avatar is my Olive Egger, and she has a teeny crest, so I'm going to go from there. I only hatched two olive eggers out the 9 eggs I got ( and the other one was a male). So, right now I only have her to start with.

I'm thinking of breeding a Polish hen to a blue egg layer, hopefully Araucana, (I absolutely adore the Araucana, but I've had so much trouble finding eggs right now). Hopefully, that will produce a crested chicken that lays a light blue egg. Then breed that one back to a dark egg layer. I have some Cuckoo Marans, but I don't really like the cuckoo color. I just sold my Welsummers, but now I wish I hadn't, as I just found out that a partridge bred to a blue would produce sex-linked chicks. I think I want to get some other color of Marans, maybe Black Copper or Birchen. Then pair the offspring of that second breeding, which should be an OE, to my wee-crested OE. I want to eventually get a Crested OE that will 'breed true', so to speak. I've been looking up information about OEs, and I'm still not sure if OE to OE is more or less likely to lay an olive colored egg. I've been trying to find a picture of the mystical "Avocado" egg, but my attempts have been fruitless (pardon the lame pun XD) . I might toss in an Isbar, too. The Marans/Isbar (Marbars) OE eggs I've seen are amazing.

I want not only an Olive egg, but a particular appearance as well. I need to study chicken genetics to make a definite plan. It may not work, or it may take several attempts to get the look I want, but, heck, I have lots of time, and I thought it might be a fun project. I just decided to do this a few months ago, so don't have a plan set-in-stone and any advice or suggestions are welcome and helpful. Sorry, that was a whole lot of explaining when basically the answer is, "not sure yet". lol!

@Bigmedicine is a very knowledgeable person on chicken genetics. he is on the Brahma thread and would probably save you a lot of research on your own.

 

[blackgoat]

@Bigmedicine  is a very knowledgeable person on chicken genetics. he is on the Brahma thread and would probably save you a lot of research on your own. 

Thank you very much!