broody and rotting eggs

[nayalusa]

Hello! We have a broody sitting on 3 fertile eggs. So far so good hopefully minus one mishap. We'll check them at 12 days (2 days from now). We had to leave for the weekend and returned to gather eggs and found 2 "new" unfertilized eggs under her so we added them to our gather. I noticed that both smelled bad through the shell ( no cracks or anything) so sat them aside and put the rest in the fridge. We cracked them and while not discolored inside they smelled bad! My first rotten eggs and I'm wondering what caused it? Im guessing just a perfect storm of heat and humidity under the hen and 2 days of not collecting? The others were fine I think. They also sat in the warm 90-100 degree temps for at least a day or two but NOT under a broody hen. I did a water float test on all the rest but didn't want to waste them by cracking to check unless I needed 18 eggs for some reason. Thanks for any insight.

 

[GitaBooks]

Yeah, it was probably from being under the broody chicken.

Have you ever tried testing an egg to see if it had a chick in it, opening it up a little bit with a needle, and ending up having a rotten egg explode on your face? My Mom did.

We open eggs much more carefully now.

Best of luck!