HELP! I am a HATCHAHOLIC.......

[Bryam]

Hello!
Is anybody else out there addicted to hatching out button quails? I currently have 18 eggs cooking in my incubator. My pair of Button Quail keep laying and I keep collecting and adding eggs to my incubator! It is madness!

Anybody in the same boat as me?

 

[Bryam]

Hello! Where are all the quail a holistic?

 

[TwoCrows]

LOL...we are here! Maybe we couldn't come to this thread because we were too busy shoving more eggs into our bators....

 

[Bryam]

Love it! What is a typical ratio of male to females when hatching eggs? In my first hatch, I hatched 18 chicks, 15 males and 3 females, is that normal? I am hoping it was just a fluke! Now I have 18 of their own eggs in the incubator and I am hoping to get 15 females and 3 males, now that would be nice!,,

 

[TwoCrows]

It seems in my hatches that males are far more common that females in quail hatches for some reason.

You might try an experiment. I have never done this but an experiment was done with a certain breed of chicken eggs. (can't remember the breed) But what they did was keep the eggs really cool after collecting them. They stored these eggs in the mid to upper 40's for temps. Fahrenheit. Rest them in these temps for 5 days before setting and then set them. Eggs are not laid with a determined sex yet. So what happened with these cold eggs was that most of the dna for growing males died off and the hatch produced far more females. (I don't know the technical jargon for this stuff. LOL)

I would imagine it works the same with all birds eggs. Maybe. You might give this a try and store your eggs really cool before setting and see if you get more females.

And let me know how it turns out!!

 

[Bryam]

Well, it will be a while before I set more eggs after these ones hatch! But it sounds like a good experiment! Worth trying one day!