Air cell check

[JDGreene]

How do the sizes of the air cells look?
Day 0, day 7, & day 14 are marked.

 

[ChickenCanoe]

IMO, they may be a tad large.
I just pay slight attention to humidity but I religiously weigh eggs to track weight loss/proper humidity.
I almost never candle except to verify embryo growth.

 

[JDGreene]

I only read about weighing them after I started incubating so I have to go by the air cell this time. Next time I'll probably weigh them. Do you trace the air cell when you weigh them?

I figured they were too small from the pics I've seen. Here is an egg I just pulled out to try to get a better pic. It is the same egg. Maybe it is easier to tell. I've been keeping my humidity between 35-40%.

 

[ChickenCanoe]

No. I've never traced an air cell. That's the beauty of weighing. You don't even need to candle.
If they are losing about 0.65% per day or 13% during incubation, that is all the information you need.
Well, they still have a week to go but I'd let it dry out a bit.

 

[JDGreene]

Thanks. How do you tell about the quitter and clear eggs just be weighing them?

So you think it's too humid, air cell too small by my pics?

 

[Kiraeh]

Moisture loss is about evaporation, so quitters/clears will have it at the same rate until near the end of incubation. Tho the air cell in a quitter will degrade and be noticeably harder to trace than a live egg, that shouldn't effect things either way.
35-40 should be pretty good, unless you live at altitude(in which case I don't know exactly what you need, only that hatching can be very challenging). I feel that running a bit dry is safer that running a bit wet, but also that there's no need to fuss too much. If you have a bad hatch and you have a lot of chicks pipped internally and then dying, that's the time to change. Right now what you're doing could be perfect, and if you mess with it you won't know.

I candle obsessively and like to mark air cells but I find them unreliable, i judge my humidity by weight too.

 

[JDGreene]

Yea thats my problem, just don't know. Where I am it is 1,100 feet so I'm not at a high elevation.

 

[LadiesAndJane]

I think they look ok. Do you see movement when you candle? Your humidity sounds good too. So many different methods used to incubate, just keep an eye on them. Maybe check again at day 17 to be on the safe side, giving you a little extra time to up humidity if you need to.

 

[JDGreene]

I wasn't really looking for movement per say but I do remember some movement in some of them and some of them not. Other than that they all appeared to have the same looks to them..... Big viens on the big end of the egg and little veins on the pointy end of the egg with a dark mass in the middle with structure in the middle (the body I presume).

 

[JDGreene]

I messed up my math above and edited it.