I need help from dry incubation fans! Quick!

[Gypsy07]

Quote:
This is good advice. You don't want to go from one extreme to the other and end up killing your chicks by drying them out too much. (I did that once and it was horrible!) If your recent hatching problems have been down to incorrect humidity then I would strongly recommend weighing your eggs. It's not a cast-iron guarantee of a good hatch but it IS the best way to get your humidity as near to perfect as possible. So if you continue to have poor hatches, at least you know it's not your humidity that's the problem. And it isn't difficult or overly complicated.

You just weigh your egg at the start, scribble the starting weight on the shell, subtract 13% (simple calculation: weight of egg x 0.87 = desired end weight), scribble the end weight on the shell too for reference, then weigh periodically through the incubation and adjust humidity up or down as required so that the egg ends up as near as you can get it to the calculated end weight. The weight loss doesn't have to be exact - a gram either way for small eggs and a couple of grams either way for big eggs is usually fine.

And once you've done it a couple of times you'll have a better idea of what humidity suits you best, and then you can probably stop weighing.

 

[hmlongino]

Thanks! I added just a little water and got it to 40%. I am going to try to keep it 35-40% during the hatch and then 65-70% at lockdown. REALLY hoping for a decent hatch this time, although two eggs broke in shipment, so I am betting they were handled roughly. Ugh. I just want to replace my flock for next year!


I have 10 speckled sussex, 8 black copper marans, and 4 golden polish in there. Here's hoping!

 

[SierraView]

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Shipped eggs are a gamble, but gambling is fun right? So far I've won more then lost

The post office sometimes does a lot of damage. If you get any broken when they've been packaged well most likely you will have a lot that are scrambled. I've had that happen before. Seems I get 5 boxes of shipped eggs that are perfect and then one that's destroyed.

 

[hmlongino]

My first two shipments in the spring were FABULOUS! Then, downhill.

 

[cdbeare]

I've been trying the dry incubation method too and the hygrometers have indicated humidity is around 25-30%. I've then raised it to 70-75% during lockdown. My hatch rates with shipped eggs have been terrible but decent with local eggs.

I've just set two new batches of shipped marans eggs. I've read that dry is better for marans but is 25% too low?

During the previous hatches I haven't seen any signs of shrink wrapping but are there other things I should be looking for to indicate humidity problems? 3 out of 15 eggs appeared fully developed during last round but none pipped internally or externally.

Hope these questions are relevant to the original thread. Thanks.

 

[Gypsy07]

Quote:
Well, if you get decent hatch rates with local eggs that tells you clear as day that your incubation skills are okay and that it's the shipped eggs that are the problem. Shipped eggs really are a gamble, and you're never guaranteed to get even one chick from them. I recently incubated 18 shipped eggs along with 4 eggs from my own birds. I hatched 3/18 from the shipped eggs and 4/4 from my own eggs. That's just how it goes...

Apart from shrink wrapping, other indicators of low humidity would be chicks that take a long time to hatch and then hatch sticky and have crusty clumps once they're dry, or very obviously, dead in shell and dried out chicks with huge aircells. Indicators of high humidity would be large and 'mushy' chicks that appear bloated, watery fluid dribbling out of the eggs when they're hatching, chicks that pip internally into the air cell but fail to pip the shell, and eggtopsied dead in shell chicks that were near enough fully developed but still had a lot of fluid in the shell.

If you had 3 fully developed but dead chicks and 12 healthy ones, I don't think you could attribute the deaths to humidity problems. It might be due to slightly low oxygen levels in your bator during lockdown. Or it could just be natural selection at work. Some chicks will develop fully but then just die for no obvious reason. That's the weaker ones being weeded out of the gene pool I suppose...

 

[cdbeare]

Unfortunately, it was
- 3 late quitter (fully developed)
- 2 early quitters
- 10 non-starters
= 0 for 15 on that set of shipped eggs
The local eggs in the same incubator, set on the same day were:
- 3 healthy hatch
- 1 late quitter (mightve been my fault as it looked clear during candle but I opened and found a fully developed chick on day 22)
- 1 non starter (really was a non starter.

Thanks for the info above that helps.

How tough should the membrane be? When opening the dead fully developed eggs, they don't look shrink wrapped but I was surprised by how tough the membrane seemed to be. I have no point of reference though.

Also, is low oxygen only an issue after they pip internaly or throughout the hatch? The cabinet incubator I built is far from airtight but I don't know how to gauge oxygen flow.

 

[Farmer_Dan]

They are alive & need to breathe throughout the incubation period. However, I feel that there is probably enough O2 in there and usually plug the holes with we paper towels during lock down to help increase humidity.

A couple vents will keep the fresh air in there for your eggs as well as help to keep the temp stable. Make sure you have vents in your homemade bator.

 

[SierraView]

I've heard marans are hard to hatch.

 

[hmlongino]

Thank you, everyone for all the great advice! Keep it coming-- it's all such a learning experience for me.

With shipped eggs, if they get shaken up during shipment, do they usually just never progress? If I candle them at day 7 and see viable embryos, will that mean I'm past the shipment issue, or can being shaken up still effect development at a later point?

Holly