Adult hen has never laid eggs, what??

[ChickNanny13]

Thank you all for chiming in. You learn something new every day if you pay attention! It's a disappointment, especially with only 3 hens....now my 5-yo Comet has gone off laying, so we may be down to one layer. We really don't enjoy the integration process with new birds, the pecking order establishment completely unnerves me, so....we will see!

I avoid integrating, instead sell when my girls are 1 - 1.5yrs and start over, not wanting to deal with "age" issues. I tried last year & it went fairly well but now my girls are older and one has gotten very "bossy".

 

[Houdini56]

I avoid integrating, instead sell when my girls are 1 - 1.5yrs and start over, not wanting to deal with "age" issues. I tried last year & it went fairly well but now my girls are older and one has gotten very "bossy".

That's sounds like a reasonable approach. We may consider chicks in the spring depending on how things play out over the winter.

 

[Houdini56]

Yeah, I'm gonna say, a buff orpington x RIR will NEVER lay a green egg. So you have something else in that bird's ancestry to lay that color egg. There's a blue egg layer in that ancestry somewhere. You could call her a barnyard mix, or non-standard easter egger, since she's laying green. (Easter eggers typically have beards and muffs, but a lot of new designer EEs have been coming out from the hatcheries lately that don't have those, and look like other breeds of bird).

As long as she's laying, it's all good.

For the hen you think is not laying - might consider crating her inside the run/coop. I use XXL wire dog crates inside my covered combo coop/run, and there's space for food, water, walking about a bit, a roost, and a place they can nest. Crate her for a week and see if she lays an egg during that time. If she stays pretty much where the other birds can see her most of the time, she won't lose her place in the pecking order, and you'll have solved a mystery. I think it's possible that you have two green egg layers, and they are taking turns, and their eggs look identical.

We have considered the possibility of two green egg layers, but in the last 5 months of laying in the same henhouse we've never found 2 green eggs in the same 24 hour period....so odds seem rather low on that to me.