Hatching female chicks method

[Susan Skylark]

This has been an interesting read, the joys of statistics! If you do enough reps of anything with 2 options (toss a coin perhaps) it should come out fifty fifty. The problem with hatching eggs is that we novices only do it on a small scale which a slight variation either direction can horribly skew the data. My son has a D in geography but as it is only the second week of school and he hasn’t turned in a group project that was due a day ago due to illness in the partner, I’m not worried (so few points this far, one small missing assignment makes a huge difference) but by the end of the quarter he’ll easily rectify it. Same with hatching chicks. While all sorts of little tricks may kill off a few undesired male eggs, overall it probably won’t account for more than a change of a couple percentage points in any direction. And if the broiler breeder (love that term) folks could figure out how to hatch sex selected eggs, they would hopefully have discovered it by now considering how much money and time it would save them! Same goes for the cancer curing capacity of your favorite herb, oil, or supplement, big pharma would soon isolate the compound and commercialize it if it was at all effective, save in an occasional case study. I’m running 4/5 male, 12/17 female, and 4/4 female on hatching quail this year, and no, the hatching parameters are all over the map (shipped eggs, home grown eggs, different incubators, one cold incubator temp, variable humidity, hand and autoturned …), just statistical probability. But maybe the post office crushed all the female eggs in my first shipment? How did they know? Interesting to contemplate but hard to prove without enough reps to produce statistical significance, hundreds or thousands of reps at one time, not many hobby breeders can pull that off!

 

[rbc-bow-chicka]

This has been an interesting read, the joys of statistics! If you do enough reps of anything with 2 options (toss a coin perhaps) it should come out fifty fifty. The problem with hatching eggs is that we novices only do it on a small scale which a slight variation either direction can horribly skew the data. My son has a D in geography but as it is only the second week of school and he hasn’t turned in a group project that was due a day ago due to illness in the partner, I’m not worried (so few points this far, one small missing assignment makes a huge difference) but by the end of the quarter he’ll easily rectify it. Same with hatching chicks. While all sorts of little tricks may kill off a few undesired male eggs, overall it probably won’t account for more than a change of a couple percentage points in any direction. And if the broiler breeder (love that term) folks could figure out how to hatch sex selected eggs, they would hopefully have discovered it by now considering how much money and time it would save them! Same goes for the cancer curing capacity of your favorite herb, oil, or supplement, big pharma would soon isolate the compound and commercialize it if it was at all effective, save in an occasional case study. I’m running 4/5 male, 12/17 female, and 4/4 female on hatching quail this year, and no, the hatching parameters are all over the map (shipped eggs, home grown eggs, different incubators, one cold incubator temp, variable humidity, hand and autoturned …), just statistical probability. But maybe the post office crushed all the female eggs in my first shipment? How did they know? Interesting to contemplate but hard to prove without enough reps to produce statistical significance, hundreds or thousands of reps at one time, not many hobby breeders can pull that off!

You are absolutely correct about all of it.

I actually ran into a podcoast with the owner of Murray McMurray who talked a bit about methods of influencing hatches. He said that at some point they had power loss in one of their incubators... or power bounces.... or something.... basically resulting in uneven incubation temps... and those chicks turned out predominantly male. I'm going to see if I can find it. It was quite fascinating.

I mean... for me... it is interesting and fascinating, but I ain't writing checks in it working again. Lol. Even if I do all of this again.... just the same.... I will have eggs belonging to different ages of chickens etc etc. And I think everything affects it.... maybe even farmer's almanac or planting by the signs type theories. I didn't keep track of that.... because it occurred to me after the fact.

So really. Who knows.

 

[JacinLarkwell]

or something.... basically resulting in uneven incubation temps... and those chicks turned out predominantly male.

There's theories that male chicks are a little more 'stable' when it comes to incubation issues because they have 2 of the same chromosome, where females have 2 different ones (opposite of mammals)

 

[Chickenlady1016]

Hello, I have been recently trying different methods for hatching female chicks. There is one method of rounder eggs being females and pointed eggs being males, I do believe that is true to a point, but it doesn't work that well. I have recently had a friend tell me another method she says it works for her, but I have yet to try it. If you put your hatching eggs in the refrigerator for a couple of days it will kill all of the males so only the female eggs will hatch. So from what I understand less eggs will hatch but the ones that do hatch will only be females. I haven't gotten a chance to test this out yet I don't think I'll be able to hatch until the end of this year, but in the meantime I was curious if any of you would like to try it out and see what the results are. Also lets have this as a discussion thread for sexing eggs. Any thoughts on this new method?

Hi CherriesBrood.
I heard about this method a couple years ago. I ventured out on a limb that spring and tried it myself, but I refrigerated the eggs for 10 days. I only started with 6 eggs to try the experiment. After 5 days of incubation, 3 eggs showed development with candling. I tossed the other 3 eggs that showed no progression. After 21 days, 2 eggs hatched while the 3rd never pipped. After the chicks reached adolescence, they were both confirmed to be hens. I was thoroughly curious to try this out again, so the following spring (2024) I repeated the same process with 6 eggs. I ended up with 3 eggs again that had developed and hatched out. Once the 3 had reached adolescence, they were also confirmed hens. I have high hope that this is indeed a good method to go by in order to hatch only females, although I would have to do this a few more times to confirm a female only hatching. I hope others try this method and express their results with us!

Chickenlady1016

 

[NatJ]

Hi CherriesBrood.
I heard about this method a couple years ago. I ventured out on a limb that spring and tried it myself, but I refrigerated the eggs for 10 days. I only started with 6 eggs to try the experiment. After 5 days of incubation, 3 eggs showed development with candling. I tossed the other 3 eggs that showed no progression. After 21 days, 2 eggs hatched while the 3rd never pipped. After the chicks reached adolescence, they were both confirmed to be hens. I was thoroughly curious to try this out again, so the following spring (2024) I repeated the same process with 6 eggs. I ended up with 3 eggs again that had developed and hatched out. Once the 3 had reached adolescence, they were also confirmed hens. I have high hope that this is indeed a good method to go by in order to hatch only females, although I would have to do this a few more times to confirm a female only hatching. I hope others try this method and express their results with us!

Chickenlady1016

Testing is good.

Unfortunately, I also did a small test once, but I did not get such good results.

4 round eggs hatched 3 males and 1 female.
4 long pointy eggs hatched 2 males and 2 females.

I was hatching quite a few eggs at the time, so I put the roundest eggs in a mesh bag inside the incubator so I would know which chicks came from them, and the longest eggs in a different mesh bag so I knew which chicks came from them. After the chicks hatched, I identified them with legbands (different colors) and kept track of them as they grew up.

 

[McChooky]

Research has proven temperature extremes will give you more of one and less of another.I'd advise anyone who hatches chicks to research this subject well before they try it. You can weaken the whole batch or kill them if done done correctly.I've never tried the pointed method but old timers swear by this method.Some swear the hens determine the hatch rate by how long she's off the nest which cools the eggs

 

[NatJ]

Research has proven temperature extremes will give you more of one and less of another.I'd advise anyone who hatches chicks to research this subject well before they try it. You can weaken the whole batch or kill them if done done correctly.

Chicken sex is determined by genes. That is very thoroughly established.

So there are only two ways temperature can affect the results: kill one sex, or cause chicks with one set of genes to develop into the other sex. Yes, you quoted a mention of one experiment that caused sex reversal in chickens. ONCE. And people who tried to replicate it were not able to (that's also in the bit you quoted.)

If anyone doubts that chicken sex is determined by genes, they can consider sexlinks. You cross one specific color of rooster with a different specific color of hen, and you get color-sexable chicks. Male chicks are one color, female chicks are another color. That demonstrates that genes are controlling both the color and the sex of the chicks. This works so reliably that commercial hatcheries produce them in large numbers, and any backyard hobbyist can get it right too.

I've never tried the pointed method but old timers swear by this method.

Yes, some old timers do swear that pointed eggs hatch male chicks and round eggs hatch female chicks. But someone even older said the opposite (Pliny the Elder, writing about two thousand years ago.) And as far as I can tell, all of them are wrong.

My own experience matches the experience of most other people: egg shape does not tell anything useful about whether the chick inside is male or female.

Some swear the hens determine the hatch rate by how long she's off the nest which cools the eggs

But in most clutches of eggs hatched by hens, there are both male and female chicks. So whatever else the hen is doing, most of them are not doing any kind of sex-selection that we can see.