On March 9, I set 47 eggs for my homemade cabinet incubator's first run. Fertility was unknown on all the eggs, as 17 came from our production layers (110 2 1/2 year old red sex link hens, 2 yearling EE roos) and 30 from a local educational farm where they had the eggs refrigerated for 9-12 days before I got them (no turning, no humidity control). I got test eggs there last year as they are cheap, but the hatch rates were poor. There aren't many flocks with roosters around here so I took what I could get. They have CCL, Marans, Brahma, and many other varieties, with roosters of all sorts that make some very interesting combinations. My two EE roos and two EE hens came from eggs I hatched last year from their fridge.
Today is day 9 and I couldn't wait until day 10 to candle. The new incubator certainly seems to be doing its job! 21 eggs are progressing nicely, 3 eggs had blood rings, and the rest were clear or are so dark shelled that I can't even watch for movement much less veining (EE over Marans). I'll check them again in a few days. I am using a 230 lumen LED lamp, so those suckers are DARK. I put the clears and "couldn't tell" eggs back in, but in a different tray. I want to handle the growing ones as little as possible. Air cells on all are right on target.
All the bantam eggs were clears
. Those little ones are so impractical in a flock of standards and turkeys, but they are oh so cute!
I had the door off for about 10 minutes for candling, and the temp and humidity recovered within 10 minutes. This design is great.
I had forgotten how unpleasant cracking open blood ring eggs can be. It's amazing how quickly they deteriorate compared to the clears.
