How can I Make My hen go Broody?

[teresa42299]

I had a cochin X go broody and got 5 chicks hatch. only 2 or 3 were hers. I heard that bantams were pretty good brooders.my friend had some bantams and he said he had about 100 chicks running around his yard.

 

[teresa42299]

we use to get a lot of chicks to hatch in our incubator but now none are hatching. what happened?

 

[cmom]

we use to get a lot of chicks to hatch in our incubator but now none are hatching. what happened?

What kind of incubator are you using, and what is your humidity and temperature during incubation. Are the chicks developing?

 

[teresa42299]

we're using a little giant 9200 still fan incubator. we keep the temp where it needs to be and the humidity I don't know. after a week after day 21 we crack the eggs open. last time we did we had almost fully develop chicks.

 

[cmom]

If the incubator humidity is too high during the first 18 days of incubation the chicks will still develop but when they pip the air cell in the egg, condensation builds up in the air cell and the chicks drown. My best hatches have been when I keep the humidity around 35% for the first 18 days and on day day 18 or 19 when I take the eggs out of the turner and set them for hatching bump the humidity up to around 75%. Here is a good thread with a lot of information on incubating and hatching with a Little Giant incubator. Good luck and have fun...

https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/601352/little-giant-incubator-tricks

 

[cmom]

we're using a little giant 9200 still fan incubator. we keep the temp where it needs to be and the humidity I don't know. after a week after day 21 we crack the eggs open. last time we did we had almost fully develop chicks.

If the incubator humidity is too high during the first 18 days of incubation the chicks will still develop but when they pip the air cell in the egg, condensation builds up in the air cell and the chicks drown. My best hatches have been when I keep the humidity around 35% for the first 18 days and on day day 18 or 19 when I take the eggs out of the turner and set them for hatching bump the humidity up to around 75%. Here is a good thread with a lot of information on incubating and hatching with a Little Giant incubator. Good luck and have fun...

https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/601352/little-giant-incubator-tricks

I would like to add that for the first 18 days of incubation the eggs need to loose some moisture for the chicks to develop properly. As I said in my previous post if the humidity is too high condensation builds up inside the egg and the chicks will drown. There are charts showing the amount of moisture an egg should loose during incubation and some people weigh their eggs to see if the eggs are adequately loosing the moisture they should. I don't go that far but have played with my humidity until I have gotten around 100% hatches. Most of my hatches are around 90% to 95% but I have had a few 100% hatches.

Here is a BYC Members Page with a lot of good information on hatching. https://www.backyardchickens.com/a/hatching-eggs-101

 

[chickencoop789]

I have a Black Australorp hen. Is there a possibility that she will go broody. If so will she be a good mother?

 

[LTygress]

There is a possibility for any chicken of ANY breed to go broody. Some breeds are just more *likely* to go than others.

Australorps aren't really known for being broody. But of course there is always that chance that one could decide to hatch her own eggs.


I personally use golfballs to get my hens to go broody (or eggs from the incubator that never hatched). But I don't necessarily just dump them in and go. For every fresh egg I pick up, I replace it with a golf ball. Within one week, I had two hens go broody, and their two sisters followed the next week. Once I was confident that they were sitting faithfully (one BYC user said he waits to make sure they spend two consecutive NIGHTS on the nest, and it worked) then I replaced all of those golfballs with eggs. Some of them came from the incubator, some of them were just waiting for *room* to be incubated!

The broody hens were all mixed breed hens though (half ameraucana, half mille fleur), and all bantams. I'm WISHING for a large fowl broody hen, but so far no luck with that. Once the bantams went broody, I was able to put roughly 10-13 eggs under them. If I had a large fowl hen go broody, imagine how many I could fit under HER!

The biggest problem I had after they went broody, was nest-switching (before all four nests got occupied by a broody) and abandoning their own once another hen's eggs hatched. Since some of the eggs had already been in the incubator, they were a week or so ahead of the others. And once all of the earlier eggs hatched and those mommies took their babies out, the other hens began helping out with those babies (I think they lost track of who belonged to who) and abandoned their own eggs that had not yet hatched.

I tried to move those inside into the incubator again, but I think I got them a bit too late, because none of them hatched.

Another side issue was that all four of these hens are nothing but "calming-mates" for a bantam rooster I was given. We got them to keep the bantam rooster from becoming aggressive and attacking people for some "action". But once all four of them were sitting on eggs, I was back to square one with the roo! Thankfully, he didn't become aggressive towards people, but he sure chased every other chicken away from the nest area so those ladies could have some peace!

 

[cmom]

Usually if a bird is going to go broody it will be in the spring/early summer. There is no way I know of to make a bird go broody. Over the years I have tried most everything and have never been successful at making a bird go broody. There have been times when I thought they might and put eggs under them but they would keep getting off the nest. They would appear to be broody but when I would check on them they were off of the nest so now I mostly use my incubator and once in awhile if I have a bird that is determined I will give her some eggs and let her hatch them. I had one gal that appeared as if she was going to sit on eggs and I put her in a brooder with some eggs and every time I would go out and check on her only one of the eggs would be under her and the rest would be at the other end of the brooder. I would put all of the eggs back under her and the next time I went out the same thing, so I took all of the eggs and put them in the incubator with other eggs I had in it. There have been others that would sit on a nest and wouldn't get off and every day I would take them off for 20/30 minutes to get them to eat, drink and poop and as soon as I unblocked the nest they would be back on the eggs in a flash. You just never know. Good luck and have fun...

 

[dylan135]

I have a white bantam hen, I put her in a barrel with a nest of 7 eggs, food and water.. she was sitting on them in 3 days , 1 chick hatched yesterday and I can hear 4 cherpping in the eggs,they are rhode island red cross bluebell