Early Christmas present

[Garden Peas]

You are so bad, but in a good way lol

I guess on the pea forum we have to take our naughty moments where we can find them

 

[Garden Peas]

First egg:





Second egg:





I guess they are infertile.

I think I see white spots on all of them, but I can't tell if there are rings around them, and my photo editor is being extremely uncooperative

 

[zazouse]

I have old incubators but they will not stay on the same temp for a day, one is 15 years old and the second is 13 years old. I really need new incubator for next spring!

If your incubator is still in good shape why not just change out the thermostat sounds like it is way past time

or get you some hens that are known to sit, i have tons of sitters here some are like 6 years old now , those hens will sit a Lego if you put it under them.

 

[zazouse]

First egg:





Second egg:





I guess they are infertile.

No babies for you

will make a nice omelet

 

[Peafowlssssssss]

If your incubator is still in good shape why not just change out the thermostat sounds like it is way past time

or get you some hens that are known to sit, i have tons of sitters here some are like 6 years old now , those hens will sit a Lego if you put it under them.

Both doesn't have auto turners, also i can't choose the humidity, when i was hatching chicken eggs, i had 10% hatch rate

I have always wondering about these hens! How they just on everything! I have never raised hens from these breeds before, but with 50 C heat in our summer would you think they will hatch any

 

[Peafowlssssssss]

No babies for you

will make a nice omelet

Good news! I have an answer now for a friend who always asking me if i put them yet in the bator or not.

 

[Garden Peas]

If your incubator is still in good shape why not just change out the thermostat sounds like it is way past time

or get you some hens that are known to sit, i have tons of sitters here some are like 6 years old now , those hens will sit a Lego if you put it under them.

Pretty girls!

Let me know if they get the Legos to hatch

 

[Garden Peas]

Both doesn't have auto turners, also i can't choose the humidity, when i was hatching chicken eggs, i had 10% hatch rate

My annoying old incubator didn't monitor humidity or have any way to control it... I had two (two!) remote sensing digital hygrometer/thermometers in there, plus a regular alcohol thermometer -- that's how I discovered the problems with uneven heating, and then it just wasn't ever stable.

Since it is so dry and a little bit high here, I just went for all the humidity I could, so I filled the reservoirs and always had extra little containers. That also helped increase thermal mass, which helped with temperature stability. I found it was important to keep the quantity of water in the incubator fairly stable, so add small amounts daily rather than large amounts every few days, and to add pre-warmed water to avoid temperature swings from putting cold water in there, or too hot water in there. I even started keeping clean, washed rocks in it to increase the thermal mass and temperature stability. How desperate is that? It actually worked.

Even with extra water containers, it is hard for me to get the humidity above 65 - 70%. I also have mesh over the extra containers, after we inadvertently drowned a chicken chick one year... which PeaLover130 will not allow me to forget in this lifetime. I keep extra containers of water, even in the new one.

The new bator has digital controls for the temperature and knows how warm it is in real numbers, not just compared to the room temperature. It wasn't very expensive, and certainly not compared to the aggravation of the old one and the loss of the chicks. I'm still soft-hearted about the babies

 

[zazouse]

Both doesn't have auto turners, also i can't choose the humidity, when i was hatching chicken eggs, i had 10% hatch rate

I have always wondering about these hens! How they just on everything! I have never raised hens from these breeds before, but with 50 C heat in our summer would you think they will hatch any

Any bred of hens that will sit eggs will work, many of my broody hens are mix breeds and they are the very best broodys.
Check around and see what kind of hens hatch out babies in your country and go from there. what i did last year is let the broodys sit them till they were found moving in the air cell then i pulled them and hatched in my hatcher.
This year I had a great hatch rate i put 75 eggs under the broodys and only 8 did not hatch

It gets into the 100's here but my hens temperature runs around 104 degrees and so they have evolved to keep the temps cooler than their body heat verses trying to keep the temp warmer from what i observed in the heat of our summer.
i plan on doing more studies on the sitters and temps but i need to get better readers to do this like it should be with multiple hens

 

[Garden Peas]

Any bred of hens that will sit eggs will work, many of my broody hens are mix breeds and they are the very best broodys.
Check around and see what kind of hens hatch out babies in your country and go from there. what i did last year is let the broodys sit them till they were found moving in the air cell then i pulled them and hatched in my hatcher.
This year I had a great hatch rate i put 75 eggs under the broodys and only 8 did not hatch

It gets into the 100's here but my hens temperature runs around 104 degrees and so they have evolved to keep the temps cooler than their body heat verses trying to keep the temp warmer from what i observed in the heat of our summer.
i plan on doing more studies on the sitters and temps but i need to get better readers to do this like it should be with multiple hens

Zaz, I've read so many times that pea eggs started under broody hens tend to have a higher hatch rate. Saw where someone thought it might be because the broodys keep the eggs moving around under them, and are always fussing with them, and that maybe that helps, particularly in the first days of incubation. What do you think? Why do eggs started under broodys have a higher hatch rate?

q8, didn't I read where you have some kind of cooling system for your pea pens? I'm guessing you must spray or mist water, and maybe augment it with a fan? That would keep the temperature down nicely, even from 50C... seems like broody hens could manage as long as you had them under shade and down to maybe 40 or 42, I bet they would be okay. I yanked my eggs from an nest which was abandoned by the peahen when she was about to cook, it was 115F or so (we were having an exceptionally hot spell), and she had built her nest on a stack of hay, right next to a west-facing wall of corrugated metal, so it was heating up like an oven. Pretty sure the eggs would have died from being overheated, but I think to some extent, like Zaz said, the hens can shield the eggs from the heat like they do from the cold, so if they weren't in an oven, maybe they would do okay?

Does anyone there hatch under hens? If they can survive in the temperatures, maybe they can also hatch in them?