First Timer: UPDATE: 12 Days After Hatch: Roos to Hens?

[gryeyes]

9 hatching eggs I won in a BYC auction arrived yesterday. Olive eggers! Carried that package OH-so-carefully into the house and set it in a safe spot and just looked at it for a while. I can hardly believe I'm gonna do this. Then I broke out the Chickens for Dummies book and devoured the chapter on incubating eggs. Re-read the Brinsea Mini Advance instruction/user manual for a fifth time. Studied the "sticky" information whilst I was at work yesterday, and printed some of the material, which I read very closely at home.

Found what I think will be the best place for the incubator and set it up to stabilize. Read the instruction manual and quick reference guides again.

Re-read the incubation chapter in the Dummies! book again this morning.

Carefully filled the incubator with its full complement of 7 eggs. (Now, what to do with those other 2 eggs??) Go hour was 0800.

I have now joined the multitudes of folks hanging out in the Incubating & Hatching Eggs forum. AAAUUUGGHHH!!!

 

[Cattitude]

Welcome to the BYC chapter of Incubators Anonymous. Gather round, and tell your tales! Have trouble with Chicken Math? We can help you out. Would you like to have a cornucopia of color when you collect eggs? We're the folks to turn to! Enablers all, we'll help you satisfy your chicken cravings and provide a place where you will be safe, where you can tell all your amazing chicken stories and we laugh in all the right places!

 

[TyrannosaurusChix]

i am also just now(literally) starting my first hatch!!!

i dont know exactly who is fertile at the moment.. i figured i will try my first at whatever mutts are in the making an dtook 10 eggs from my fil for a total of 30 eggs. 2 are bantam eggs, my bantam ee decided not to lay as soon as she heard the bator box crack open! and i saw she was bred.. probably for the first time so she isnt laying.. weird!


im skeered im going to screw this up.. which is the reason i pu t a lot in AND the reason i dont care if they are mutts-- why put the time in for pure chicks if i fudge it up?

 

[cackleberrylinda]

Hi,
I do know how you feel.........Really I do. I was so afraid I would kill my little Call Duck eggs when I put them in the incubator. Oh Lawd Have Mercy!!! I still am not feeling 100% capable of pulling this off, but I am finally feeling like, "What the heck!" Kinda like when you walk out on the diving board for the first time, there's a line behind you so you can't walk back off, so you JUMP! And maybe you will dive beautifully or you will just hold your nose and go for it! Either way, you're in the water and swimming. Sigh of relief. I set my little duckies in the bator on the 4th of July. And I looked in yesterday and there looks to be something happening in most of the eggs. Now, if I can just get these little babies to the pond, I will be so happy. I will be happy with 3. Or 4 so there will be two pairs I hope. But hey! we did it. Let's just hope the Incubator Angels hover near and help the little eggs survive our missteps. My heart is already so full of love for them. And I am planning my next batch....And the next...
Now, I better figure out how I am going to house everyone.

 

[gryeyes]

Well, I've heard the 'bator do its auto-turning thing (but never make it into the guest room to see it happening) so at least I know SOMETHING is doing something. There have been no high or low temp alarms.

No evil, scaly, bubbling egg-monsters have blown up in the thing (which happend in a dream the other night!) and I don't have a hygrometer, or is that hydrometer? Can't obsess about any readings on one o' those.....

I'm already planning on what to do if none of these hatch: fill it next time with Rebecca's eggs, because she's the only laying EE and the rooster is an EE. Her egg which hatched under Buffy gave me my beautiful GrandChick, and while I have resisted getting duplicate breeds for my flock, at least I would know what they are IF anything hatches from such a second attempt with Rebecca's eggs.

But that's in the future, at least 15 days from now.

People here on BYC are SO helpful and so kind about responding to my questions, too. I'm still totally afraid I'm gonna screw something up, even though I've only had to do these tasks: set up, turn on the Brinsea and wait 24 hours. Put 7 eggs in it. Pour some water in the center reservoir. Put the lid on. Set the number of hatch days. Walk away. Come back and check on water level, add some to the reservoir about the second day. Haven't had to add more yet.

But somehow I think I could screw that up.... {really need a fingernail biting smiley!}

 

[TyrannosaurusChix]

mine needs water a lot

 

[gryeyes]

Hmmmm. I waited the three days the manual suggested and the reservoir WAS empty. So now I'm checking twice a day. I daren't check more often. Not yet, anyway!


(And, of course, I immediately thought "oh no, I've killed 'em!")

 

[DerbyChook]

So exciting! I will start my fist hatch week of August 2 in my Brinsea Eco. Will be keeping an eye on this thread to see how your hatch is going, so update with anything interesting.

 

[BrownEggFan]

Quote:

 

[CuddleBug Ranch]

My daughter and I just set a dozen eggs for the first time in our homemade incubator on July 14. We hover around it several times a day checking temperature and humidity. Every time the temperature has gone low or high, I think well that's it, I've just killed them! Then we candle them at night only to find them moving around and growing! So...we must be doing something right! We have a schedule and a system. They are turned at 3 am, 9 am, 3 pm and 9 pm. We can do a middle of the night turning as my husband and other daughter do a newspaper route and get up at 2 or 3 every morning so someone is available at all hours to do the turning. We have 12 mixed eggs, and one Black Australorp. We didn't want to spend a fortune on eggs and not have the incubator work, so we bought a dozen fertilized eggs off a neighbor. She has mixes of cochins, rhode island reds, and something else that I don't remember. At this point we are midway, and keeping our fingers and toes crossed!