Broody hen and her eggs

[amirfarmer]

i want to know that does a broody hen know that the embryo inside eggs is live or dead????? actually my hen is broody but she is not sitting on those eggs...... she is sitting away from them...... i think she knows which egg is live and which one is dead

 

[sumi]

Judging from my own experiences with broody hens, I doubt hen knows when an egg is viable or not. I've had hens roll eggs out of their nests that hatched after I slipped them back under the hens. I've seen a determined broody hen (not my own, I would never do that) sit for 3 months on a rotten egg once and I recently swapped a broody hen's eggs for golf balls after she broke an egg in the nest and I had to clean it up. I finished the eggs off in the incubator and she happily sat on the balls, until I replaced them with her chicks. In my experience a broody would sit on anything that resembles an egg, whether it is an egg, alive or dead, or not.