Thanks! I thought I had read that about silkie eggs as well.
It pertains to bantam eggs in general too. The extra white is basically extra sugars and extra weight for the chick to carry and it means that if you hatch a large egg alongside a silkie/bantam egg, the banty tends to hatch much more alert and speedy, skinnier but raring to go, whereas the bigger egg hatches a fatter, slower baby who tends to rest a lot and waddles rather than sprints.
While it sleeps off that initial weight the banty is ferociously adding to its low hatch weight and by the time the pudgy bub has gotten to the fighting fit shape the banty hatched in, the banty is already developmentally far ahead of it, and that's an advantage the bigger bub usually can't catch up to.
I found larger babies are a false economy, usually not worth hatching anything larger than medium sized eggs, and pretty much everyone who breeds livestock has found this too, bigger babies do poorly. The miniature babies gain faster than the bigger babies, whose very size sets them behind.
I have been tempted to try the food coloring in the vent thing to see which ones are laying which eggs, but I'm afraid of doing something to them that will hurt them.
I'm with you there... If you have a day off, like a weekend, you can hang out around the coop and watch who lays what egg, that works well. Years down the track I can still tell at first glance who lays what egg by the unique features of each egg, from shape to shell texture to color to size etc...
Plus, once you're familiar with the hens, you can tell the mothers' and grandmothers' influence too just by looking at a new pullet's egg, shell color may change but the other traits are generally much stronger. Alternatively you could put a little camera in the coop and use that to check, but once you're familiar with who lays what sort of egg, you'll probably be able to easily identify. Helps to keep different genetic lines too, when using that method.
Best wishes.
