Do you candle all 120 quail eggs???! (HOW?)

[gabrielle1976]

Ok akane whens the next web cam Im going thru withdrawls

 

[rachel]

How long do you think is an acceptable amount of time to have the eggs out of the incubator? I can't see this taking less than 15-20 minutes.... They're in a turner, so they have to all be out at once.

 

[Akane]

I try to keep eggs out a max of 10mins before putting it back in the incubator. If your opening the incubator repeatedly and not candling quickly it would be better to go a little less and just candle half and then a few hours later or the next day candle the other half so it doesn't lose too much heat.

Friday hopefully I'll have the buttons on cam. My last few hatches have been small and not that great so it hasn't been worth putting up the cam. I have 50 button eggs in now though. The only difficulty is that I'm hatching from 2 seperate sources that I want to keep apart so right down the middle where I would normally point the cam is a cardboard barrier. I'll have to play with it tonight or tomorrow and hopefully I can find a good way to get majority on screen.

 

[rachel]

Well, I found one cracked one and one smelly one. I candled most of them. I had them out 10-12 minutes, I really hope that wasn't too long. The incubator lid was closed though, so at least they got put back into a 100 degree incubator. Ugh, now I'm really nervous that I messed something up by having them out for so long.

 

[Akane]

They should be fine. Some people have several hour power outages with the bator going below 90F. If the bator isn't opened I would expect the eggs have cooled at close to the same rate. They still get good hatches. The eggs will hold heat for quite awhile so as long as the incubator isn't repeatedly opened and comes back to temp quickly the inside of the egg probably didn't even cool that much. I candle all my eggs repeatedly and I've never lost one that seemed it could be attributed to candling. Any I've lost died days away from when I candled or had another more obvious reason like an unplugged bator or insane humidity spike when the snow around here melted.