how can you tell if eggs are successfully fertilized?

[austindon]

any tricks to telling if you have a successfully fertilized egg? i read about candling but don't know what that means. what do you do with the candle, how do you do it and what do you look for? thank you.

 

[sourland]

Candling, is shining a bright light through an egg in a darkened environment so that the inside of the egg is visible. Candling only indicates fertility if an egg has been incubated with resultant vein and embryo development. Do a forum search on candling. There are some great threads. Also do a search on 'Fertile eggs bulls eye'. Every egg has a single cell nucleus visible on the yolk. A fertile egg prior to incubation will go through a few cellular divisions resulting a bulls eye like appearance of the nucleus.

 

[1muttsfan]

As Sourland says, the only two ways to tell if an egg is fertile is to crack it open and look for the bullseye, or to incubate it and see if it develops.