Dan's incubation and hatching thread.

[DanielE1990]

Hello and welcome everyone to this journey of excitement, surprise and mystery.

Ok I know that may be a little overstated but this is exciting for me.

So let's dive into the mystery that is incubation and hope for a pleasant surprise at the end.

Now to set up this tale.
I decided a couple of weeks ago to jump head long into this and buy some hatching eggs online and try to hatch them myself. I have never really done much incubating before and what I did years ago was a disaster.

I started by buying 10 Japanese bantam eggs. And a few days later also won a bid of 6 additional Japanese bantam eggs.
These arrived in the mail and I ended up with a total of 22 eggs!
I started the first batch on June13 and the second batch was started on the 16th in the same incubator.

I did (what I thought was) day 12 candling (actually day 11) today and found several eggs that was no good. I found one with no development in the first batch and 2 with no development in the second batch along with 5 others that had terminated around days 4-9 in the first batch.
These all had a red blood ring with little to no visible embryo development. I did have one that had an embryo that could have been at day 8-9.

I may also have two additional that terminated on day 9-10 but I was unsure if they was truly dead so I placed them back in for now.
As it stands I started with 22 in the incubator and now have 14. How many will make it? Who knows but hoping for 10-11 at the end.

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I have a second incubator set up standard large breed chickens hatching eggs. With these I ordered 10 Australorps (got 20) and 10 Bielefelders (got 11) for a total of 31 hatching eggs. These are currently on day 6 having started on June 18.
I have not candled these yet but will be soon so that I can discard any non developing eggs.

Lastly I have a 3rd incubator with 49 coturnix quail eggs. (I had 50 but dropped one one the floor unfortunately)

I hope to keep this thread updated with the development of this project and that you all enjoy this journey of discovery and suspense with me!

 

[Tonyroo]

Looks like your doing a big hatch, keep track of the days for each batch and good luck.

 

[21hens-incharge]

I love a good hatching thread! Following along to learn, observe and root for the tiny chickies.

 

[DanielE1990]

Looks like your doing a big hatch, keep track of the days for each batch and good luck.

Got an app for that

 

[Tonyroo]

Very cool glad to see you thought ahead.

 

[DanielE1990]

Thought I'd add a few pics on what I got going on.
These are the bantams

These are the standard breed

There are the quail (going to put something in the bottom on the incubator when I figure out what I am going to do.) Right not it's just too slick.

This is how I modified to make it an air circulated incubator.

 

[DanielE1990]

Happy and sad news today. The bantam incubator has been having more issues and though two thermometers was reading 99°F the eggs felt cold. This was the still air homemade one I put together in a hurry. I can see many improvements that could be done before it is used again.

All that saidI candled all the eggs again and honestly only 5 looked to be possibly good so I moved them in with the standard breed eggs in my homemade circulated air incubator.

Now for the good news! I did day 8 candling on the large breed eggs and almost all of them are looking great! I had 2 that was no development and 1 that's 50/50 right now. Looks like it is lagging behind at the moment. But right now I have 28/30 that are looking great and on track! Even saw some movement is a few as I checked them.

Lastly I changed the tray underneath the quail eggs to make them more manageable. Not sure when/if I will be able to candle them.

 

[DanielE1990]

Candling done!

So I did lose a few more of the Japanese bantam eggs but I'm happy to say that I have 4 that are still going strong.
Here they are!
This is the one that I still have of the first group.

I have 3 in group #2

Then here is a few of the standard breed eggs. (Lighter colors shells. I could not get pic of the darker brown eggs at all.)

 

[Tonyroo]

Thank you for the updates.

 

[DanielE1990]

Waiting for one egg to hatch lol.
It's the night of day 20.

Here is a pic of eggs I have because. Pics. Lol