Help - No progress since last night

[tia]

I should add this is the kind of math that sticks... examples of how you use math in real life... hands on. How many students are going to forget this? Not too many - better by far than a stupid work sheet any day.

 

[Gypsy07]

I got a digital scale really cheap from my local supermarket, I think it was £12. Well worth the money. It just takes so much of the guesswork out of humidity. And the thing I noticed is, with one incubation 45% works well, with another it's far too high, with another it's too low. Right now I've got some shipped eggs in my bator along with some eggs from my own birds. And my own eggs are losing moisture WAY faster than the eggs that were shipped to me. If I had a spare bator, I'd have split them up so I could incubate them at two different humidities. Instead, I just had to split the difference and raise the humidity slightly. My own eggs are going to finish up slightly too dry, and the shipped eggs are going to end up with slightly too much moisture left, but I'm hoping it'll be okay.

The moisture loss percentages aren't exact anyway. Chickens are often quoted as 11-15%. Brinsea says 13%, which is right in the middle. And people always say ducks need more humidity than chickens, right? Well, I read 16% for ducks in a waterfowl book, so that's what I aimed at with my current incubation. But I ended up doing a dry incubation after day 10 to get my duck eggs to the right weight, and they only just made it. I was worried the whole last two weeks that they weren't going to lose enough weight.

If I'd followed the usual advice, I'd have drowned my ducklings for sure. But I put them into lockdown today and I could see clear movement in the eggs.