I need some creative chicken brains to help!

[ms.cluckling]

Haha! I have the same science fair project at my school, so I chose hatching chickens!
This is my question/topic that I used--
"Does turning the eggs affect the hatch rate?"
Of course it does, and I wouldn't want to kill the poor things, but, in my experience, they're fine.
See, this is my first time attempting to raise/hatch chickens. But I have 7 eggs in the non-turning group, and of those three are developing, and one is shaking and wiggling its egg as we speak (it is day 18). Three out of seven may sound terrible, but of those 7, 3 were infertile to begin with (I threw them out today, and , and one quit on me day 5 or so, so its a pretty good idea, and it doesn't really kill chicks
I'm in middle school too, 8th grade

 

[growinupinfl]

You could build a bator fairly easy. If you can't borrow one..

 

[growinupinfl]

Sorry double post.

 

[kyle7630]

I think some of it depends on their grade level. Last year my son did his kindergarten one. What does a K student care about formulating a hypothesis and a conclusion? I let him have at it and just encouraged him. I looked at the other K students projects and it was very clear that they hardly touched the things. Their parents did it all. If you are going for a first place ribbon, then follow the rules. If you want your kid to have fun, just let them do what ever they want and turn it in. My sons project didn't come close to winning a ribbon, but it was the talk of the class, and the kids, parents, and teachers alike couldn't keep their hands off of it.

 

[Hottchick]

I thinik we're going to try with the refrigerated vs. non refrigerated eggs. Thanks so much for all of the ideas! My sister is a teacher and she has an incubator I can borrow. Now, which breed of chicken should I try to get? If I have a good hatch rate I will have to give them away. I want to keep 2 pullets for myself.

My son is excited about this. He loves the chickens.

 

[Egghead_Jr]

I'm preferable to the Temp vs. Sex experiment.

This would be very easy to do with scientific unbiased outcome. On ebay you can purchase two hot water heater thermostats for the price of one, $9 (I'll send along the link if you can't find it.) Setting one styro cooler at 102F and other at 98F then placing same # of eggs from same source in each. Of course a third control incubator at 100F would be perfect but the 2 is enough. If your eggs were sex linked then recordable difference of temp vs. sex is witnessed at hatch.

 

[Hottchick]

I thought about that briefly but I have 2 problems--1. I really don't want roosters and to create a bunch of roosters is not something I want to do. (even though I would give them away) 2. I really don't know how to sex a chick so I wouldn't be able to give real results.

 

[Ridgerunner]

If you can get eggs that give sex linked chicks, you can solve the sexing problem. Getting the eggs could be a problem, though.

 

[Hottchick]

Oooooh, that could be interesting. Anyone know where to get sex-linked fertile eggs? That would save me a bit of heartache once they hatch too in determining which 2 I can keep (of course, depending on how the hatching goes. I'm counting chickens before they hatch). And that would be a great experiment.

 

[Hottchick]

I know it's been a while since this thread was started but I wanted to give an update. We did wind up going with the refrigerated eggs vs. non-refrigerated eggs. We wound up with a horrible hatch rate and only 1 chick hatched alive. It was from a refrigerated egg. There were 3 other fully formed chicks and I don't know what happened.

His project came out beautiful. We took photos along the way and attached them to his project along with the descriptions and some chicken embryo development information. It looked great and best of all, today he won 1st place in his grade for his science fair project!

The whole thing has been awesome! Thanks to everyone who helped!

Only problem is now I want to try to hatch more eggs to see if we can be more successful.........