how to clean eggs?

[Theicequeen]

my girls are only 2 1/2 months so i have time but i was wondering how you clean your eggs and what you do with them? When do hens lay their eggs, morning , night, anytime?

I have heard taking a very fine sand paper and cleaning off the dirt and debree and nothing else, and i have heard of people cleanin or rinsing off the eggs, i dont know what to do with them,lo;

 

[gritsar]

When you rinse eggs, you remove the bloom. The bloom is a natural "top coat" that the hen applies to the egg at the very end of the laying process. It seals the egg to keep out dirt and germs. Eggs with the bloom intact last alot longer than eggs with the bloom removed.
To answer your first question - I don't wash my eggs. I keep my nestboxes as clean as possible and most eggs come in from the coop ready to go in the fridge. For the occasional dirty spot I use a paper towel to scrub the spot off. Really dirty eggs, for example ones that were dropped on the floor of the coop, get fed to the dogs.
I choose to refrgerate, others don't. Either way is fine, but eggs on the counter do lose their freshness faster I've read.
It takes a hen roughly 26 hours to lay an egg. The way that works in my coop is this - if my hens visit the nestbox at 10 tomorrow morning I can expect them to visit around 11 AM the next day. This hourly staggering continues until the day arrives that it's too late in the day to lay, then they either start over the next day or skip a day and start over early in the morning the next.

Yes, most of my hens cycle together, which is the same phenomenom seen in female humans living or working together. On any given day most of my hens visit the boxes at roughly the same time; with one or two waiting till just a bit later than their sisters.

 

[briteday]

I second the motion of keeping the nest boxes clean. I learned that from the first hens I bought. I got them as point of lay pullets. The guy never had anything for them to roost on and they had acquired the habit of sleeping in the nest boxes. I had dirty eggs every day for two years and finally gave up on those birds, I gave them away. Now when I move my pullets fromt he brooder to the big girl coop I make sure they are roosting at night when I close the door, not sleeping in the nests.

Any dirty eggs still go to the dogs.

I currently get home from work at 2PM. When I check in the morning at 7AM there is sometimes 1-2 eggs from 11 hens. Sometimes there are none. By 2PM I get about 8 eggs. And then I check nests again around 5PM and may get another 1-2 eggs.

 

[A.T. Hagan]

Every body has to come to their own conclusions about washing eggs. I wash all of mine. We gather into a basket. In the kitchen I pour hot soapy water over them then clean them under hot running water at least twenty degrees warmer than the eggs. Into another basket to drain.

This thing about the bloom is way overblown in my opinion unless you're going to be storing the eggs for months. Sandpapering definitely removes it too.