So I guess we will start an American Bresse Hatch A Long on here now
I purchased 18 American Bresse Hatching Eggs two days ago. Drove over an hour to pick them up locally, so they took a short trip. I let them sit just in case til the next morning because they had travelled a bit even though I know they were handled with the utmost care and attention because I held them all the way home, due to the vibration and curves, I wanted to let them sit for a bit before setting them.
There are different Incubation recommendations depending on whether eggs have been shipped or not. I chose to follow the shipped egg recommendations just to be safe. These were not cheap and I don't like to gamble.
As I've said before, one of the main goals of your family is to be more self sufficient. The two breeds I chose after endless hrs of research were Faverolles and American Bresse. Both are dual purpose breeds. But I've also read that if you intend to use your birds for meat and eggs that putting in the due diligence to find breeders who have been specifically selecting for such traits is worth the effort. You may not be happy with the amount of meat you get at processing if you buy stock from hatchery's especially ones not selecting for these traits or new and inexperienced breeders that don't know about the traits that are easily lost and must be selected for to have exceptional quality dual purpose birds. Unfortunately, these days a "dual purpose" bird from most hatchery's simply means a heavier egg layer that won't produce adequate fleshing at acceptable growth rates. It's a good selling point though and is exactly the reason why most don't stay with dual purpose breeds after processing.
Anyways - I purchased eggs from someone who is actually using their birds for meat and eggs and selecting for traits that I look for. They have a few yrs on me. I may purchase eggs from a another breeder later on to get eggs from more established lines but to start with I wanted eggs from someone local so I didn't have to gamble on shipped eggs.
I purchased 18 and was given 20. Some of the eggs were not as clean as I would of preferred but I put them in anyways. I candled them for cracks and weighed all of them. Which gave me three categories of weights. Apparently the French standard recommends hatching eggs to be 51 grams. Majority of the eggs were on this class. Which was about 49 grams to 55 grams. The second largest group was the under weight group which I am not very thrilled about as they usually indicate pullet eggs and I don't hatch pullet eggs usually. These were too expensive to not put them in the Incubator so it will be interesting to note the differences in the resulting chicks if they hatch at all bc pullet eggs are known for infertility, embryo deaths, and sickly failure to thrive type chicks. I also get advice from the information that Mandelynn Royale posts online. She hatches slightly larger eggs then what the original source recommended. There were 3 eggs in the 58 gram of higher group. They weighed in the mid 60's if I remember correctly.
Personally for hatching eggs I only sell eggs that weigh correctly, are clean but not washed, and have been stored properly, after being candled to make sure they are viable. A lot of these eggs would not have passed several of those checks had they been coming from our farm. But I'm going to incubate them regardless because I paid too much to just toss them. 11 of the eggs were in the right weight category but I was generous in the weights and actually included several that were technically too small in this group too. And a few were not as clean as I would of preferred. The color of the eggs are also not exactly right for American Bresse. Had I been selecting for correct color most of these eggs would of actually been culled because they were too dark for the French standard. Color is at the bottom of my priority list especially for my Utility breeds but I do take it into consideration. I will actually separate all these eggs into banding categories like small, correct, large eggs size and then correct/incorrect egg color. That way when I make breeding decisions later I can take those things into consideration a long with their other structural traits.
We are 20 days from D day but I am excited to see how these guys hatch out. I will be candling on day 5 but won't make any cull decisions until lockdown.
Leaving it anyway just in case as I have heard they are doing an electing new members and will be restoring things shortly.
a new hatch-a-long!
other then actually just creating a new thread and leaving a link in this one to the new one, I can't come up with a good way to do so. I'm not sure I want to migrate just yet. I would like to change the name to something more meaningful or catchy. Maybe "The Broody Hen Hatchery" or "Breeding Hindsight is 2020" or "Notes from the Breeder I used to Be" or maybe "Breeding by Divine Design"...... Honestly I have a few pages of ideas I've come up with names for the farm...
Haven't quite decided yet if it should be some meaningful or funny yet. I guess time will tell.
Lord, I hope not! 
