duck egg question

RedfogsFlock

Songster
12 Years
Jan 17, 2010
617
8
216
Wittmann, AZ
Ok so our two chocolate runners are now giving us an egg a day! At first we were putting them in the fridge and then we discovered they were fertile. They had the little white bullseye when I cracked them open. This is our first try, but my parents incubated duck eggs when I was little all the time.

Soooooo we decided to get an incubator and hatch them. Currently we have 7 in the bator! They are on days 3, 4, & 5. So now what we're wondering is

Can we put more in now safely to incubate? I know that we have to put them on "lockdown" the last 3 days, so what about turning the new ones?

My hubby doesn't want to put them in the fridge either!
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What about selling them? Does anyone know what the going rate is for them? We would be selling 6 at a time I guess. AND how on earth do you ship them?

Oh what to do
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what to do
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Did you put them in the incubator on different days? You can wait about a week with the eggs in room temperature untill you get all of the ones you want to incubate. When you put them all in together, that is when you "set" them. This is how you avoid different hatch dates.
 
Yes I was told you can do a staggered hatching, but you will need a separate hatcher if do a staggered hatch, because you are going to be changing the humidity and temp on the last three day. Just keep a record of what day they are set in the bator. Good Luck.
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Yeah we put them in 5 on day one, then one a day till we had 7 in there. We were thinking that we wouldn't be able to add anymore, because then we would have to open the bator to turn the eggs and that can't be done the last three days, correct? I was under the impression it had to stay closed. BUT then doing the math if we have to lock them down the last three days then we should be fine adding eggs the way we did, because by the time the last duck hatches, the first ones will be ready to come out.

4-H mom~~~~`

We don't have a second incubator, so that is why I was wondering about selling off the extras. The room that we keep our babies, and eggs in is always warm so we figured we could keep the duck eggs to sell in there for 6 days till it was time for them to go.

Thank you both for the feedback it is much appreciated!
 
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The trouble with selling them when you only have a pair of ducks is that, if you only have 1 laying Runner hen (which is what I'm assuming from your post), then the oldest eggs would be a week old by the time you accumulated enough to ship 6 of them - which some people wouldn't have a problem with, but I personally like to buy eggs that are promised to be less than three days old at the time of shipping, because the shipping can take another 3-4 days, and after day 10, the viability of the egg begins to drop considerably.

The preferred method of shipping eggs (and there are a few variations that work perfectly well) is to wrap each one individually in bubble wrap and pack tightly in a large box with lots of "stuffing" (I like crumpled newspaper, packing peanuts just don't pack tightly enough). Some people wrap the eggs in the thinner bubble wrap (with smaller bubbles) and then place them in an egg carton, and then wrap the egg carton itself in bubble wrap and pack it in a box with lots of "stuffing". Your goal is to pack the eggs so that they move as little as possible, and to try and prevent them from absorbing any shock the box receives (hence packing them in the center of a nice, big box).
 
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You could try selling by pickup only, that would cut out the days of shipping time, but of course that limits your potential market.
 

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