First egg

[Irma Litton]

Yippeee after a very long waiting period one of our hens laid an egg this morning.... what to do... my son is devastative because he does not want to eat it. Some advice on what to do with the first eggs.... will they hatch if I leave them in the coupe?

 

[amirfarmer]

egg will not hatch until your hen got broody.....you can hatch it by using incubator

 

[Irma Litton]

Hi there, thank you for the advice.... so when will my hen be broody.... anything I need to look out for.
Sorry this is our first time.
If I do not put the eggs in an incubator.... can I leave them or should we eat them?

 

[Aphrael]

Do you have a rooster in with your hens? If you don't then the egg will not be fertile and will not hatch. If you do then you could certainly incubate it if you wanted to. Just be ready to take care of a baby in 21 days. If you don't have a rooster then the only thing to do is eat it, or give it away to someone else to eat.

There is no way to tell when, or even IF a hen will go broody. Some hens may go broody at the drop of a hat, others may never go broody in their entire lives, it just depends on the hen.

Oh, and you should not leave the egg out there. If left too long it will go bad and could explode, leaving a smelly yucky mess in your coop.

 

[Irma Litton]

Thank you!
I think my chickens are also spoiled!
The first egg is in the fridge toi be eaten at some point not by me!!
I have a rooster.. he is called "Chuck"
What do you mean by incubate?
I thought the girls will look after the eggs untill the chick is born?

 

[Aphrael]

A hen will "set" eggs only if she goes broody and is serious about it. If you want to hatch eggs but don't have any hens that are currently broody, then you would have to set eggs in an incubator (a machine that holds all environmental factors inside it at the proper conditions to grow a chick) and hatch them yourself. In this situation, you would also have to rear the chicks yourself, separate from the adult chooks until they are big enough to join the flock.

 

[LTygress]

www.m-w.com
Look up "incubate" on there

Many breeds of chicken were actually bred to NOT sit on their own eggs. When a hen starts to sit on her own eggs to hatch them, she stops laying eggs while she hatches the eggs and cares for the young chicks. Most people prefer they keep laying eggs, so through years of selective breeding, they created chickens that will never guard, warm, or hatch their own eggs or care for their babies.