Blue egg genetics?

[earthnut]

Yes blue ear lobes too! (though white would be ok too)

Yes I've seen pictures of blue-eyed chickens. Dominiques can have them sometimes.

 

[mel58]

how would you go about increasing the blue of the eggs? I've never seen a pic of a bluish egg I would call truely blue like a robins egg. they are all more bluish green or greenish blue.

would it be possible to breed to get a robins egg blue type egg? would you just hatch only the bluest eggs and keep only the roosters from the bluest eggs if the blue is carried by the rooster?

or is someone working on this or is there really a blue egg and I haven't seen it?

 

[earthnut]

The blue pigment is the same as a robin, so they can be the same hue, however, I think because chickens have bigger eggs they are lighter. I tried finding a breeder of "dark" blue eggs, but it seems like it just doesn't happen. If someone knows of someone, let me know!!! I've thought of ways to darken the egg color, but all involve genetic engineering.

There are many shades of the eggs, everything from greenish to purplish. Here's the official egg color chart from the British Araucana Society. Realize that the colors are really not true on the web, but the card was made by matching real submitted eggshells.

 

[alohachickens]

The photo isn't showing up for me - Earthnut, could you post a link? Sounds neat!

If anyone on here wants to post pix of their bluest eggs, I'd love to see them!

 

[JJSmith]

Hi Everyone,
I just wanted to let you know my results on crossing EE with other breeds. I have EE X Leghorn with the most beautiful sky blue egg, I have EE X RIR that layed brown eggs with blue dots on them, and I have EE X Columbian's that lay brown eggs. Sometimes you never know what you will get, especially with different hatcheries you don't know what they used to make the EE'ers so you could get almost anything. Out of the 3 EE's I got 3 years ago none of them layed the nice sky blue egg, more of an olive color, but cross them with the leghorns and voila sky blue eggs and pretty nice little birds as well.
Jayme

 

[earthnut]

Brown eggs with blue dots! I'd love to see a pic of that!

I read about a breeder trying to make a strain of high production blue eggers. He started by crossing a leghorn with an Ameraucana and got the most beautiful blue eggs! But he couldn't keep up that characteristic in subsequent generations. Leghorns have such white eggs evidently because they have "brown-suppressing" genes, which is what made the hybrids' eggs so blue.

Here's the link to the blue egg chart:
http://www.ameraucana.org/abcforum/index.php?a=topic&s=attach&id=337

 

[fishgirl]

Hi all, hope this isn't a repeat: our 'Ameraucana' laid her first egg today. She and the barred rock went into the coop, sat in the nest box, they came out, and there were two pale brown eggs. Does this mean she's not really an Ameraucana? E.g., if her mom was a heterozygote for the blue gene and her dad did not carry the blue gene (or did not pass it on). Can a bird look like an Ameraucana and not lay blue eggs?
??

 

[CynthiaM]

I'm very glad this topic has been resurrected, it has some incredibly interesting discussion in here about blue eggs, and has answered some of my questions that I wondered about too, great. Some of the discussion got a little deep, but I think I got the gist that the blue egg gene is pretty dominant. Have a wonderful day.

 

[77horses]

not to high jack your thread, but I have a question about the blue egg gene;

We have an Ameraucana pullet, named Raven, who lays blue eggs. If we crossed her with our Splash Cochin (not a bantam) rooster, would the resulting chick(if it was a female) lay blue eggs or brown-colored eggs?

Thanks!

 

[Akane]

The resulting chick would have a 50-100% chance of having the blue egg laying gene. Since brown is also dominant and rarely does a breed only have 1 of such genes then the offspring will also get the brown gene. Therefore you will get 50-100% green and any that don't lay green will lay some shade of brown. There are several genes that effect the white to brown shades of an egg so the exact shade of brown or green eggs cannot be predicted without more information.

If you want a blue egg, you need a rooster and a hen with a blue egg gene, otherwise you get green or brown eggs from the offspring.

This is still wrong. You can have a hen that only has genes for white and a rooster that has 1 blue gene and end up with 50% blue eggs from the offspring. Reverse is true too. A roo with only white genes and a hen with 1 blue and you'll get 50% blue. If either one has 2 blue genes or both have a blue gene your odds go up but both parents do not have to have the gene in order to get blue eggs.

I think some of the confusion comes from the fact when we talk about this gene genetically we call it blue even if the hen is laying green eggs. A hen laying green eggs still has 1 or both copies of the blue gene. It's just the brown with the blue that makes green so when referring to the genetics both green and blue eggs get termed blue. If in the above example either the hen or the roo had brown genes then you would get the same percentage of offspring with the blue gene their eggs would just be green tinted instead because they also would carry brown. Still works the same though. Only 1 parent needs a copy of the gene to get at least 50% colored egg layers and if 1 parent has both copies you get 100% colored eggs. If both parents have 1 copy you get 75% colored.​