Is candling really worth the potential damage you may cause while attempting it? My first hatch I decided not to try candling because it seemed unneccessary. It turned out that only 6 of my 18 eggs were fertile so with my second hatch I am wondering if I should try candling. This batch of eggs are marans eggs, which may make it hard to see anything especially for someone like me who has never done it before.
I like to candle because I get to see what is going on. If on days 10-14 they are clear I take them out so they will not explode in the bator.
If the eggs are really dark, as most marans are, I wouldn't bother. You probably won't see much anyway. In my experience, it doesn't seem to hurt eggs from my own chickens to candle them often, but the shipped eggs I have gotten didn't do well. I only candled those 3 or 4 times, and had 3 live hatches out of 38 eggs. I won't candle shipped eggs much, if at all, in the future. They have such a rough time during shipping as it is, and moving them around to candle them doesn't seem to help.
We use a powerful flashlight to candle with that way we can make sure the eggs that stay in the bater are fertile. Infertile eggs get tossed out to make room for others. Have 32 in the bater now all fertile and growing. We candle every few days to make sure all is well.
I just figured out candling, and I'm glad I did. I had one undeveloped egg in the bunch and I tossed it today (plus I got to open it up and teach a 10 year old about how an egg develops and how it can fail). Now I'm using a hen and not an incubator... so it made more room for the other 3 eggs and I think we will no longer have any issues with room with only 3. I think it was an amazingly thing to see candling the egg. I read an egg can be out up to a 1/2 hr and not do any damage to the egg or developing chick. So I wasn't worried about anything going wrong. I candled on Friday and today the eggs developed much more, so I feel pretty safe in the candling process. We'll candle them again next Tuesday for the 10 year old's learning process. She's very excited, and not much of a school kid, so its exciting to see her so interested in something educational.
