Bad egg

[janetryan]

i have an egg customer who told me about one of my eggs being hard to crack and all black and gross inside. I've never seen it myself and she didn't send a picture...too grossed out I think. The eggs were all less than a week old, fertilized, stored unwashed on counter in house with swamp cooler ( not super hot). Any ideas of what would cause that? How to test for it to be sure I don't lose customers to nasty eggs? TIA

 

[Fallenone05]

Float your eggs in water. Fill a large bowl or cup with enough water to cover an egg with extra space. If the egg stays flat on the bottom, it's still good. If it stands up right, it's getting older. If it floats, it's a bad egg.

 

[Ol Grey Mare]

Black inside is of bacteria our fungus inside the egg.... most likely from as infection in the hen. Float testing is not always good at detecting them as they often respond just like a "good egg "

 

[Ol Grey Mare]

Did your customer report what color shell the egg had? This may help you narrow who the source is

 

[janetryan]

I float test all my eggs, and all passed. No, this was a different issue. It sounds like I need to isolate all my girls to figure out who is laying the contaminated eggs That will be an interesting problem to solve. I hanks

 

[rIrs roost]

i have an egg customer who told me about one of my eggs being hard to crack and all black and gross inside. I've never seen it myself and she didn't send a picture...too grossed out I think. The eggs were all less than a week old, fertilized, stored unwashed on counter in house with swamp cooler ( not super hot). Any ideas of what would cause that? How to test for it to be sure I don't lose customers to nasty eggs? TIA

Welcome to byc. Only thing that I could think of is if maybe you missed that egg for awhile and it's been hot enough to start it incubating or a hen has sat on it long enough to start the incubation.

 

[Wishing4Wings]

Hard to crack is usually good, means the egg has a nice strong shell. Black inside sounds like some sort of bacteria, but did your customer complain of a bad smell? Rotten eggs smell bad. Sometimes due to glitches in egg production, there will be blood in the egg, but it looks red, not black. There are other abnormalities of eggs, but I've never heard of anything being black that wasn't rot.

I have found eggs with little hairline cracks in them that are almost impossible to see. I think bacteria could enter through a crack and cause the problem you had. You can candle eggs with a flashlight to look for cracks. The commercial egg producers have machines that check every egg.


I was reading some more, and it is rare, but possible, that the hen has a bacterial infection in the oviduct that infected the yolk before it was encased in the shell. This would make sense considering your egg was only a week old. Not sure how to tell which hen it is or how to treat.

I also read that there are some black yolks that don't smell and that cotton seed meal can make yolks dark.

 

[janetryan]

Yes, it smelled rotten. I'm pretty sure now she has the rare that a bacteria or fungus caused her to lay a rotten egg. My next problem is fuguring out which hen... trying to figure out how to isolate 15 hens. Guess I should be glad it's not 50

 

[aart]

Had some bad eggs once, very bloody inside, told all (4) customers if they found one to put the whole thing shell and all in a container in the fridge for me to pick up so I could ID the bird laying it. Only happened once more.