Candling with lots of eggs?

[flocknfoal]

This is my first try at incubating. We have about 48 eggs in a Genesis 1588 incubator. Temp is holding steady between 99.5 and 100.2 with humidity running between 25% and 35%. Tomorrow will be 7 days so we will be candling them tomorrow night or Saturday night. I don't want to leave the lid off long enough to candle that many eggs, so I'm wondering the best way to go about this? I'm thinking maybe take maybe 6 to 8 out and place them in a egg carton, close the lid while candling those, then open, put those back and take 6 or 8 more out?

How do you go about candling when you have a lot of eggs?

Thanks for your help!!
Shanna

 

[cody42]

I'm on my last day of incubating my first batch of eggs and I started with 12 turkey eggs, 9 duck eggs, 9 guinea eggs and 6 chicken eggs. It took me quite awhile to candle all of mine and I only had 36 eggs total. I'm using a farm innovations still air incubator, and i've been doing a dry hatch, which means not adding any water as long as your humidity stays around 35 to 45 percent, which mine did without ever adding any water at all. I would take my lid of the whole time i was candling and shortly after replacing the lid my humidity would jump back up to the right levels. From what i've read you have a little room to play with on humidity levels until you go into lockdown, but after lockdown you need to keep the level around 70 to 80 percent. The main thing to watch out for is your air cell development, as long as your air cell is progressing at the right pace you should be fine. I'm fairly new at this so others with more experience might be able to give you better advice, but following this method i've had a wonderful hatch rate with my birds, 9 of my 12 turkeys made it to lockdown and 8 of the 9 hatched, 8 of my 9 duck eggs made it to lockdown and 7 have hatched, 6 of 9 guinea eggs went into lockdown and all are either already out or on their way out, 4 of my 6 chicken eggs have made it to lockdown and i expect them to hatch sometime tonight or tomorrow morning. Almost all of my eggs that didn't make it were not fertile to begin with. So i think you'll be ok while candling, but your idea to do a few at a time sounds like an either better plan to play it safe.