How to make nesting boxes more attractive to your hens?

[Cheekychook12]

An egg from a young hen who didn’t feel it coming. Didn’t understand what the ‘I feel some something strange/pressure in my poop area ’ meant.

Older hens seem to know and can keep it up for a while, if they want to postpone to lay the egg. Sometimes a hen waits in front of her favourite nestbox if its occupied by another hen.

Yeah my lavender girl was wandering around looking for her straw bag, and I put it in front of her, five minutes later, egg

 

[BDutch]

I did put straw in one of them, but it turns out they like grass the best, I put long pieces curled around in a nest shape and it’s the favourite so far
They also can’t kick it out of the nest
How close do you think this girl is to laying? She’s 17 weeks and growing like wattles and has a red face (the blue one)

Probably several weeks. Fertility signs show before the hen actually starts laying.

 

[BDutch]

Is it in a clean “safe” spot? I regularly clean mine out. Sometimes there’s poop and crushed eggs. I make sure it’s dry and clean in a quiet safe spot.i use nesting pads from amazon which is 10 for $20. It’s soft and dry. They like it.

A nest box doesnt have to be very clean at all for the hens. Buying pads is expensive and isn’t necessary.
Cleaning is mainly necessary to avoid an infestation with parasites.

As a base I use cardboard in winter and a layer of sand mixed with diatomaceous earth (DE) in summer. On top this I add bedding. The bedding varies with the season and can be hay, semi dried lawn grass (summer), dry leaves (autumn), shavings (wet) or straw (cold). Even shredded newspaper is an option.

To avoid a red mite infestation, I do refresh the bedding every week in summer. When the temps rise I make a thicker layer of sand and add more DE into the sand. When its getting hot I leave most of the bedding out.

 

[BDutch]

Yeah my lavender girl was wandering around looking for her straw bag, and I put it in front of her, five minutes later, egg

Your lavender girl definitely knows the egg is coming. She obviously prefers to lay it in the straw bag. If you like her to lay inside the coop, try putting the straw bag in the coop.

 

[Cheekychook12]

Your lavender girl definitely knows the egg is coming. She obviously prefers to lay it in the straw bag. If you like her to lay inside the coop, try putting the straw bag in the coop.

I think I will, I could even line one of the nest boxes with the bag

 

[CombNWattles]

My boxes have curtains made out of an old shirt. Berta peeks out to see if anyone’s around:

Sometimes Berta isn’t the brightest. Once I was cleaning the coop while she was hanging out in the box, and when I moved them she just sat there. XD

The boxes are a movable frame without a floor. They sit against the wall where the ‘egg door’ is. Here is Big demonstrating how the egg door works:

 

[Cheekychook12]

My boxes have curtains made out of an old shirt. Berta peeks out to see if anyone’s around:
View attachment 4041723

Sometimes Berta isn’t the brightest. Once I was cleaning the coop while she was hanging out in the box, and when I moved them she just sat there. XD
View attachment 4041726

The boxes are a movable frame without a floor. They sit against the wall where the ‘egg door’ is. Here is Big demonstrating how the egg door works:
View attachment 4041734

The rag curtains are a good idea.. I have some rags left over from painting and redoing my room, they’d have paint and stains on them but if I washed them maybe they would work?
Your rooster there looks very similar to my cockerel Boris, yours is prettier though lol

 

[Bonnieboo]

I have four hens and 7 soon to be laying pullets, I let my chickens free range and they have been laying in different spots every day, I have nesting boxes that they used to use, but don’t anymore
We have many bushes in the yard and they are really tricky to find the eggs, I have to crawl through leaves, sticks and spider webs to get to a single egg, and I recently thought one of my chickens had disappeared, turns out she was nesting in a bag of straw

What can I do to make the boxes more attractive?

What a cheeky girl! I'll bet you had a good laugh at that discovery

 

[Cheekychook12]

What a cheeky girl! I'll bet you had a good laugh at that discovery

Yeah I did lol, but I was really worried she has escaped or gotten eaten! Crazy little chicken

 

[birdlady11]

The vast majority of my hens through the years have preferred a box that was more enclosed (the privacy factor) and that were off the ground (the harder for those pesky rat snakes to find the eggs). And truth be told, as I got older I found it more challenging to get eggs from boxes on the ground (or maybe I became more lazy?). So I came up with a design that my girls loved.

I used hooded kitty litter boxes at garage sales. I made a raised platform for the lighter or more energetic girls who could jump and built a ramp for those heavier, more sedate ladies who found jumping up on and down from the platform more difficult.

My girls HATE wood chips or wood shavings and refuse to use them so I do mostly dried grass clippings from when my hubby mows the lawn or waste hay from my neighbors horses or cows.

For those wanna-be moms I used an old broken recycle bin (I didn't break it - the garbage men did tossing it down the driveway!) turned it upside down and cut an arched door in the front, air holes in the top. Because I have a natural sand/dirt floor, I dug a big of a bowl in the ground and filled it with the dried grass clippings That way she could lead her brood straight in and out of the ground box without having the kids climb out of a nest box with a frame.

If I have a hen who decides she wants to lay somewhere other than the coop boxes I will keep her in the coop until she lays then let her out, and do that for as many days as it takes for her to get back into the next box habit.