Is it normal for my 32 week old Amber Star to not have laid an egg?

[jodiplunk]

Thanks so much for this info Kelsie. The article is very thorough and helpful. I am a little confused by the correct bulb to use though. The hatchery told me to get a daylight bulb, but am I reading from this article that that is wrong? It doesn't give off and orange/red light...... I have read elsewhere to have the extra hours all in the morning (as this article suggests) so that the chickens can go to bed with the sun, but again the hatchery said to share those hours morning and evening. Makes me wonder the advice they have been giving me now?! Any suggestions for correct light bulbs and where to get them would be very gratefully received! Thanks again.

 

[Kelsie2290]

http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mdarre/poultrypages/light_inset.html Yet another link This one goes into the gory technical aspects of lighting. Basically you just want a "warm" (usually incandescent) type light bulb, not one of the ones that is labeled as "cool". If you look at the bulb box it should say what it is on the back of the box, usually there is a section under "lighting Facts per bulb" called something like "Light Appearance" with a number or graph like 2700K (happens to be on the box I have here). They recommend adding light in the morning, but I usually add hours in the morning and the evening, mainly because it gets dark so early I would wake them up anyhow when I get home from work if they put themselves up at dark in the winter.

From above article...The lighting industry uses four methods to describe light color but only one really applies to selecting lighting for poultry, chromaticity. Chromaticity is the measure of a light source's warmth (warm light) or coolness (cool light) expressed in degrees Kelvin. The scale runs from 2000 to 7000K. Chromaticity values of 4000K and higher are considered cool (mostly blue light), those around 3500K or 3600K are called "balanced" or "neutral" and those of about 3000K or lower are considered warm (more red light). A color temperature designation is truly accurate only for an incandescent lamp because it produces a continuous spectrum. Fluorescent and HID (high-intensity discharge; HP Sodium and Metal Halide lamps) lamps are said to have a "correlated" (apparent) color temperature and are thus always described using the term correlated color temperature (CCT) (Knisley, 1990).

 

[donrae]

I'd confine them for a few days and see if you get any eggs. They can be wicked clever about hiding nests.