Oh, how old are they?? Should I check Hope for red things under her chin? Remember that the father is what gives the chicks their egg traits- or at least the colour of the eggs the babies will eventually lay... That sounds really good!I looked at my chicks today and under 3 you can see red lines on their chins, so 3 roos that is good, now my husband says he wants to keep one after he sees what they look like, I don't need anymore roos. So the other 6, hens yeah eggs, eggs, and more eggs, that's what I need. now to see if they take after the RIR or the Buff for egg production, RIR's are more efficient and lay larger eggs than the Buff, but the Buff goes broody.
Hmmm, I looked up chicken genetics a while back, and I learned that the babies will get the colours from the dominant genes (White is dominant over any other gene colour), and the recessive genes may only show a bit of the colour on the chick if that made any sense. Hope's father was a white leghorn (White feather colour= dominant= will show up above any other colour) and the mother was a production red (red= recessive colour= will only show up a litte to none.) Hope is now getting her feathers all over, and she has a total of two feathers so far that are brown (for the production red side of her, I guess) And the rest of her is white. As for egg colour (I don't know about size or amount of laying), I have heard the father will always give the shell colouring to the females, and (I am not 100% sure on this part) the mother will pass on her egg- shell colour qualities to the male chicks. So any of the males you have will (preseumably) get the egg shell colour gene from the mothers (so what ever egg shell colour the female that hatched the chick will give that colour to the male chick to pass on), and the father will give the pullets his breed's egg shell colour and they will lay that colour of egg. If the parents were mixes or hybrids in the first place, then I don't know, the chicks will become mystery pullets. I am no expert. XD But I am pretty confident on the information that I found.kats here is a chart of all the traits and how they go into the chicks....
http://www.ithaca.edu/staff/jhenderson/chooks/chooks.html
no clue of what you just saw?? neither did Iand if you made sense of something, then you must be a genius or you know very much
I have no idea of any breed about what traits they get from their mother and what from the father, but for my crosses, I'm hoping looks from father, and egg laying from the mothers...
