Hi, I am very new to the chicken world, and I have lots of questions. What I want to know now concerns broody hens and hatch success. my chickens are 9 months old today, and a couple months ago one of my cochins went broody. I put her in a crate with 9 eggs and let her do her thing. I did not candle becuse I didn't have a good setup, and 6 eggs were rotten, several burst. 2 babies died in (my fault...long story)the shell and 1 lived. I guess my question is why were so many rotten? Were they not fertilized? I had 2 roosters in with 22 hens, and every egg we ate was fertile. what can I do in the future(besides candling) to improve my hatch rates?
The usual reason for a rotten egg is that it was not fertilized, or the broody, which is not necessarily careful when turning eggs managed to create hairline cracks in a few which lead to an infection thus rotting egg. The roo/hen ratio sounds about right, but if for some reason one roo rules the roost so to say and the second roo doesn't get to the hens as well, it might be more like 1:20 than the 1:11 it would be if roosters shared.
as silkie said, 1 roo per flock is better than 2 roos per flock. and what i know is if many egg rotten perhaps that's the fault of weather, yes, sounds silly but that's what people said here if they got many rotten eggs. when the hen come out to eat/drink/poo then the egg is *unshielded* by momma and being exposed to extreme heat/cold/humidity make the egg failed to continue growing and even rotten. but almost same like silkiechicken said, perhaps in my thinking, the momma hen out and have water/dirt at her feet then she *transfer* it accidentally to the egg when sitting on it. that's why the egg rot, but that's a guess, i guess no one can 100% predict exactly the cause of the rotten egg. many factor influence it.
