So tell me if I'm understanding this correctly, a Speckled Sussex Roo doesn't carry dominant genes as far as coloring? Or is it just that the breeds of hens i have are more dominant?
Are hens the ones that carry the color genes?
Curiosity peaked more lol
It's mostly the Speckled Sussex having recessive genes.
If you like to have chicks in many colors, a rooster with recessive genes is fun to have, because the chicks will mostly take after their mothers.
For comparison, if you had a Barred Rock rooster, all chicks would be black with white barring. Or if you had a White Leghorn rooser, chicks would be white with occasional bits of leakage in other colors.
If you would like to play with various color combinations, the chicken calculator can be great fun:
http://kippenjungle.nl/breeds/crossbreeds.html
This version lets you choose a breed in the top and put it in the calculator (Sussex, Speckled), and then you can change the genes in the dropdown boxes and watch the picture change.
The mottling gene (mo) is recessive, and most of your hens don't have it. So change it to Mo+/mo, and the dots disappear from the chicken image. (That's basically what the chicks with a Rhode Island Red mother will be.)
The top one of the dropdown gene boxes has E^Wh/E^Wh for a Speckled Sussex or a Rhode Island Red. To model chicks from a Black Copper Marans hen, change that box to E^R/E^Wh. That gets a bird that's split for Birchen and Wheaten, but it shows the BIrchen pattern because Birchen is dominant to Wheaten. The differences in those patterns are more obvious for females than for males.
To model chicks from a Barred Rock hen, change that same top box to E/E^Wh. That gives a chicken that is all black ("Extended Black" is the name of the gene), but carrying Wheaten. Sons also get B/b+ for white barring, while daughters have the calculator's default of b+/-
For the Cream Legbar-mix hens, they probably have one copy of the Cream gene. It's abbreviation is Di (for "dilute"). So they are probably Di/di+ and will give Di to some chicks (making them have cream or light gold/brown) and will give di+ to some other chicks (letting them show a darker red/brown color, because they do not have Cream diluting the color.)
Cream Legbars have e+/e+ wildtype at the top dropdown box, but I do not know what your crossed hens ended up with. It could still be e+/e+, or they might have E^Wh/e+ (which seems likely from your description), or maybe something else yet. So I'm not entirely sure how to model that part. From your description, I am pretty sure they do not have E (Extended Black) or E^R (Birchen).
Basic notes about the chicken calculator, that also apply to some other resources on chicken genetics:
Genes with + are the form found in the wild ancestors of chickens, and are the default settings of the calculator until you change it (setting a breed, or changing the individual boxes.) It is not really important to remember this. I have just been putting in the + so things will look the same in my typing as they do in the calculator.
Capital letters indicate dominant genes, lowercase letters indicate recessive genes. This is important, because often the same letter represents both the dominant and recessive genes, and the only difference is whether the letter is capitalized or not. Example: s+ is the recessive gene for gold, S is the dominant gene called Silver that changes gold to white.
Each dropdown box is one locus (place on the chromosome where a gene is located). Some have just two gene options, but some have quite a few choices (which means there have been several different mutations at that same place, although no individual chicken has more than two of them.)
Barring and a few others are on the Z sex chromosome. Roosters have ZZ, so they can have two barring genes, or two genes for not-barred, or one barred and one not-barred. Hens have ZW, so they can only have one barring gene or one gene for not-barred. Your Barred Rock hen will give barring to her sons (Z chromosome), but she gives a W chromosome to her daughters (makes them female, does not have a gene for barring or for not-barring.)
The calculator can figure offspring from a cross, but I mostly like to play with it by changing genes and watching the pictures change. That has helped me learn about the individual genes, but my main reason for "playing" that way is because I have fun doing it
