Well now that I'm finally starting to get some eggs, I was wondering about the egg-laying cycle. I know I"ve seen here or elsewhere an explanation about the egg-laying process and the time it takes, along with a statement similar to, "If a chicken lays at X o'clock today, she will lay at Y o'clock tomorrow and so on," but I can't find it.
"It is said" that chickens have a 25 hour laying cycle - that is, if egg #1 is laid at 10 a.m. today, it will take about 25 hours for her to transport another egg thru the reproductive tract and she'll lay #2 around 11 a.m. tomorrow. Thus (again, "it is said") a chicken that lays daily will lay later and later each day, eventually skipping a day before resuming. Now, this may well be true as a statistical generalization across large numbers of chickens of some particular breed under some particular conditions. However, my girls (ISA Browns) lay their eggs at almost exactly the same time every day, day in, day out, virtually no variation nor missed days. Chickens can't read Pat
I found that my new layers took a while to get their cycle regulated. My very first layer was on more of a 27 hr cycle, then she'd skip a day or 2, but then she'd lay a double yolker. It was easy to track then b/c only 2 out of the 15 were laying at the time (All the same age, but matured at diff rates) It took her a few weeks to get going. So don't be alarmed in the beginning if they don't lay according to what the books say. Eventually when they all started laying I couldn't keep tract of who was laying when. Wish I had a web cam.
25 hours is the norm for really good layers. Last I knew a Black Australorp holds the world record for egg production-364 eggs in 365 days. That's a bit more than 1 every 25 hours, so it IS possible to have an egg a day, basically.