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Our first year with Legbars we breed three pullets in 2012. One laid a really big egg that tended to have a green tint to then and had a chalky texture. The other two laid eggs that were power blue but were really small. One of them had the chalky texture and the egg color faded with laying to were the eggs were almost white after a few months. The other has a smooth texture and kept a fairly consistent color to the end of the laying season. Our goal was to get big eggs, powder blue color, smooth texture, and to not have the eggs fade to almost white. We got a lot of variation and very little consistency the first few years. We started to get control over the breeding after that and have been making progress for the past four years on the egg traits. Last year get over 80% of the pullets laying the smooth texture eggs, power blue color, and no fading to the nearly white color with two thirds laying big eggs (i.e. over 70 grams).
A note on egg color. I think that it is possible that the hens that have egg color fade only are carrying one copy of the blue eggs gene. Four years ago we culled all the cockerel from hens that had fading eggs and toe punch all the pullets from those hens. None of the pullets from the fading eggs mother got fading eggs, but the following year were were getting one out of seven hens with fading eggs color. We culled all of those hens. We have created some cream legbar crosses. Their eggs are never as blue as our pure Legbars. My wife can line up the Legbar Crosses and the Pure Legbar eggs without telling me which are what and I can sort them correctly into the pure Legbar and the Crosses. When we started with the breed the pure Legbar eggs all looked like the cross eggs that we now get, so our egg color is improving. They will never be a Robin's blue though. They are a very light blue. They are defiantly blue though. We have a friend over to the house once and from across the room 30 feet away so saw the eggs sitting on the counter and exclaimed "Those eggs are blue!" She almost ran across the room to inspect them closer. She didn't know that chickens could lay blue eggs and was totally stunned. I love that type of feed back. I can barely see a difference from year to year and sometimes wonder if I am making any progress at all, but feed back like that lets me know that I am.
I only found one photo of the egg color we get. There is only one Legbar egg for contrast to the Olive Eggs of a Marans/Legbar Cross. That is what all out ours look like though in color.
