Blue jean in Easter Eggers

[Orpingtons4me]

If I have a Easter Egger hen that lays blue or green eggs and I breed her with a Black Jersey Giant is there a very big chance any of the chicks could get the jean to lay blue or green eggs?

 

[Ridgerunner]

The simple answer is that if the hen lays blue or green eggs, there is a real good chance some of her daughters will lay blue or green eggs. Now the complicated answer

I don’t know how well you know basic genetics. The genes we are talking about come in pairs. The chick gets one gene from each of its parents.

There are two baseline colors for eggs, either blue or white. If you look under the membrane on the inside of an egg when you crack it, you will either see blue or white. The brown or green color comes from brown color that is laid on top of the baseline color. There are many different genes that can make brown. That’s why there are so many different shades of brown or green possible.

Think of it this way:
Base blue + no brown = blue
Base blue + brown = green
Base white + no brown = white
Base white + brown = brown

Your Jersey Giant rooster will contribute brown genes so none of the eggs will be white or blue. They will all be either brown or green.

The blue gene is dominant over the white gene. That means if just one of the genes the chick gets is blue the pullets will lay blue or green eggs. The cockerels get those same genes but of course they don’t lay eggs so you can’t always tell what genes they have. The nomenclature used for this blue gene is capital “O” for blue and small “o” for white.

One of the problems with EE’s is that you don’t know if they have one “O” gene or two if they lay blue or green eggs. If they lay brown or white eggs they do not have the blue egg gene. None of their offspring will lay green eggs with that rooster their father. With that rooster as the father, if you want green eggs, you have to hatch blue or green eggs.

If your EE is pure for the blue egg gene (that means both her genes are blue and she is OO) she will always give a blue egg gene to all her offspring. The rooster will always give a white gene or “o”, so all the offspring will be Oo, or what is called split for that gene. Since blue is dominant, all the eggs the pullets lay will be green.

If your EE hen is split for the blue/white egg gene or Oo, she will randomly give an O to some of her offspring and an o to the rest. That jersey Giant rooster will always give an o. So some of the offspring will be Oo and those pullets will lay green eggs. But the others will be oo and lay brown eggs. You really can’t tell if the roosters are Oo or oo.

One of the genetics experts on this forum said that the blue egg gene tends to follow the pea comb 97% of the time. If the rooster from that mating has the pea comb (and his mother had the pea comb to start with) there is a real good chance that the male offspring from your mating will be split for the blue egg gene. No guarantees but a real good chance. That may help you decide which rooster to keep for the future.

Good luck!

 

[Orpingtons4me]

Thanks for the info. That really helps!

 

[lookyhereboy]

I'm just wondering how you get your chickens to put on blue jeans. Thanks for the chuckle but it would be interesting to know if the gene of the colored eggs would pass on with cross breeding.