How big does a egg have to be to incubate? My Lavender Orpingtons have been laying for a couple of months now, but eggs don't seem as big as some of the other eggs I have incubated. How long should you wait to incubate after they start laying there first egg?
I have incubated a lot of pullet eggs with great results. I usually wait a couple weeks after they start laying regular then hatch away.
An egg need only be big enough to hold the chick inside of it. I wouldn't try to incubate their first few eggs, but if they have been laying for two months there should be no problems. If you know the rooster has been servicing them I say incubate away.
Those eggs should be good to go. When a pullet first starts to lay the eggs are pretty small compared to what they will eventually be, but they do gradually get bigger. Also, the hen’s internal egg making factory is pretty complicated, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. That’s why you sometimes get those weird pullet eggs when they first start to lay. Sometimes it takes pullets a while to debug their egg making factory. As complicated as it is the surprise is that so many get it right to start with. For an egg to hatch a lot of things need to be right. Size is not the only thing. A shell too thick or thin can cause problems. The thickness of the egg white or how the different egg parts are put together can cause problems. The egg needs to be fertile, pullets don’t always squat for a rooster when they first start laying. But by two months, most of these things and others should have been worked out. I regularly hatch pullet eggs but I try to wait until they have been laying at least a month before I set them. I’ve noticed that my hatch rate is not quite as good as with eggs from hens that have been laying longer. That doesn’t mean I usually get horrible hatch rates. It means that if I set the same number of pullet eggs and hen eggs slightly more hen eggs, on average, will hatch. I’ve had great hatches with pullet eggs, I’ve had some pretty spotty hatches with hen eggs. On average hen eggs do better but the difference isn’t that much. I hardly ever have a chick die that has hatched. It happens but it is pretty rare. When one does die it is usually one from a pullet egg. Again, I hardly ever have any die, pullet egg or hen egg, but it can happen. Be prepared for maybe not as great hatch rate and possibly a bit more mortality, but I hatch pullet eggs all the time, usually quite successfully. By two months there isn’t going to be much of a difference between them and if you wait another two months or even longer. And welcome to the forum.
