Hatching Chicks and Guineas together...will it work?

[Chick-a-roo Girl]

Hi All,

I am new to your forum, although I read some of these posts pretty frequently when I am internet searching poultry stuff.

I am going to try and hatch my first batch of Guinea eggs and I want to include a batch of rare breed chickens in the hatch.

I have a home built red cabinet incubator, based on GFQ design and parts. I will hold 100's of eggs...that is I would never attempt to hatch as many as I could in there, but I have 5 shelves/levels to work with. It is set to exactly 100 degrees in the middle right now, although top shelf is more like 101, bottom shelf, 98.5. Fan is on top, contained, although vent holes are available.

The thing is this, I keep reading that Guineas need to have 50-60% humidity, and even higher the last few days. But I have found with hatching the chicks that I get a better hatch rate keeping it closer to 35%, or whatever the room humidity is, no water in pan. Then, I raise it right at the end of the hatch to prevent stuck chick syndrome. At one time, I followed instructions to keep 50-60% for chicks, and after about 3 hatches with high percentages of cripples and dead-in-shell/drown chicks, I switched to the dry hatch method and had better success.

Does anyone have experience hatching Guineas and Chicks together? What did you find to be the ideal medium humidity and temp levels to be? Any advice, success or failure stories?

Thanks,
Jeanne

 

[Eastins Eggs]

The incubating times are different for the two types of birds. I wouldn't do it if I were you.

 

[speckledhen]

The only way it will work is to start the guineas about a week before the chickens. They take about 28 days to the chickens' 21. I know folks who have done it. I dont know that there is any different requirement as far as humidity, though.

 

[roche477]

I'm doing it right now!

 

[countrybum]

I hatch Guinea eggs and chick eggs together all the time, along with pheasant and peafowl eggs also. The Guineas take 28 days and the chicks 21 days, so you have plenty of time to raise humidity. As for dry hatching, I have never done it, I keep my humidity around 50 and raise between 70 and 75 at hatch time. The problem with Guinea eggs is the are very hard shell eggs, if you tap them, they sound like they are glass. So Good luck with however you do it.

 

[CindyS]

I use my oegb broodys to hatch guinea eggs, they pile 3 and 4 to the nests so its the only eggs I can give them without them breaking. I havent asked them (the hens) if they have higher humidity for the guinea eggs but they usually have 100% hatches