I don't have any interest in doing this but I am curious how this is possible. I thought that in order to hatch they have to be kept warm right away. I guess not Just curious
Store bought eggs are not fertile. However, I have heard of Safeway selling fertile eggs on occasion...but the normal eggs you get will just rot & make a mess. Just search the hatching eggs thread, eggbid or ebay to buy some eggs if you want hatch them. But be warned, it's VERY addictive! LOL
Quote:You can buy fertilized eggs from the store but 7 days from the date of lay the fertility rate decreases. But it can be done. People on this site do it all the time. Also a hen when she goes broody will take up 9 -13 days to to lay her clutch of eggs before she begins to sit on them.
From my understanding store bought eggs are infertile. There are no roosters to make them that way. That aside the eggs are cleaned with a sanitizer solution(bleach) to give them that snow white appearance. Further most supermarket eggs are treated with low level radiation to kill any bacteria in the egg, which would also kill any fertility. That said others and myself appears to have been sold store bought eggs under the pretense that they were gamefowl eggs. When buyers started contacting each other it was realized that everybody had zero fertility on perfect uniformed sized snow white clean clean eggs. The seller has disappeared and hopefully a investigation is on going. It is possible though I think to buy farmers market eggs and have them be fertile. As a lot of them come from individuals like us.
Majority of eggs are not fertile and the odds of finding fertile eggs at a big chain store like walmart is low. However some store bought eggs can be fertile. If you look at the organic/pasture raised/cage free varieties sometimes you can get fertile eggs. Eggs will hatch after refrigeration. In fact I hatched eggs that were so cold I thought they were frozen. I have been getting solidly frozen eggs from my coop so it was entirely possible. Since they weren't cracked I candled, the contents still moved some, so I set them. All developped even though few hatched but they were pullet eggs incubated with button quail eggs so that they sat through the quail hatching before they reached day 18. I refrigerate all my quail eggs even if I'm going to incubate them and have had near 100% hatches. 1 died out of 25 on my first hatch of my own eggs. Some of which had been in the fridge 2 weeks. While quail eggs are a bit hardier you can still definitely hatch chicken eggs that have gotten cold. So long as they haven't actually frozen and aren't too old there is a chance of them hatching. The age of store bought eggs probably impacts their chance of developping more than refrigeration does.
Check out this link below https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=124940 all you have to do to find fertile eggs from the grocery store is to look for the ones marked "Fertile"
My brother-in-law will eat nothing but fertile eggs ! My dear sister has been buying them for him from the local health food store for over 20years. I have no idea why he insists on them...I guess I'll have to ask! But I forwarded the Trader Joe's thread to her and told her it would be a great project for her kids to build an incubator Carolyn
It is possible....we woke up to a baby chick from a grocery store egg this morning! My kids have been incubating grocery store eggs as part of a science project. The chick looks normal and is doing well. The link winekntrychicks mentioned is to the thread about it. I posted other pics there. When we started the project, we looked for eggs with the most recent packing date. The egg that the chick came out of had been packed 3 days before we bought it. 8 embryos began development. We had another dz eggs that didn't develop that had been packed 12 days before purchase. Since it was the first time our family had incubated anything and my 8 year old built the incubator, we are happy with our single chick. The kids and I handled the eggs and candled throughout the experiment to see the embryonic growth, so his odds were not as good as someone hatching for pets or livestock. There are 3 eggs still in the incubator from the same batch. We will leave them 2 more days before throwing them out. We are going to run the experiment again with a set of eggs that are 6 days old and some that are not marked as "fertile." https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/uploads/20741_100_1423.jpg https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/uploads/20741_100_1297.jpg
The kids and I handled the eggs and candled throughout the experiment to see the embryonic growth, so his odds were not as good as someone hatching for pets or livestock. Candling does no harm. I've candled every day and had them all make it to hatching day. They can be out of the incubator for up to 15mins a day before they start to cool. Even then they'll still hatch but may be delayed if they cool too much or too often. Hens get off their eggs everyday to take care of themselves and they don't have auto turners under their rears. They have to uncover the eggs to turn. So long as you aren't dropping eggs and spinning them around roughly they are fine to take out and look at frequently up until about the 18th day. After that the drop in humidity of removing them from the bator may keep them from breaking the membrane for hatching.
