Candling at 15 HOURS?

[Kyanite]

Wow, that's awesome. Congrats on a great first hatch!

 

[AmyLynn2374]

Just an update: We candled our eggs on day 8 and most seemed to be doing really well. We marked the ones that either we couldn't really tell or we could discern without a doubt were not developing; however, because this is our first hatch, we kept all the eggs in the incubator in case we were wrong.

On Friday at 6am, about 6 hours shy of a full 21 days, we had our first chick! As of yesterday afternoon, 30 of our 42 eggs have hatched - that's almost 72%! We are thrilled. We left the incubator in lockdown until Saturday at 6pm (36 hrs) and pulled 21 chicks out, left the newest/wettest ones (4) and waited until last night to remove those ones (plus the 5 others that had hatched since). All 30 babies are now in their brooder, eating, drinking, cheeping and pooping away!

We'll remove the remaining eggs tonight, open them up to see at what point they stopped developing (if they developed at all), clean the incubator and have it all set for batch #2 tomorrow!

Congrats! That's excellent.

 

[Englishable]

After opening up the eggs that didn't hatch, we noted that several were fully developed but incredibly wet on the inside. Searching the forums here, it seems maybe our humidity was a bit off? Since we don't have a hygrometer, we decided to keep track of weight lost during Hatch #2 and adjust humidity accordingly.

We set 35 eggs on June 13th and weighed the full tray of eggs. Every three days we weighed it again. On day 9, two of the eggs started smelly really funky (bacteria growing in them?), so we tossed them. We adjusted our goal weights for just the 33 eggs then.

Yesterday morning we got our first chick, and as of tonight we had 26! We pulled those ones and put them in the brooder, and there's at least one more that has started hatching in the incubator. So we will hopefully get 27 if not more. Out of 35 eggs to start, 27 would be 77%!!

I kept a spreadsheet and chart to track weight loss:

 

[AmyLynn2374]

Moisture loss monitoring is the best way to monitor humidity conditions and know if you are on target. I prefer air cell monitoring to weighing, but both methods allow you to see how your humidity is affecting the eggs.