Missed the Easter hatchalong, anyone else setting 4/10?

[Alaskan]

I wish I had a room in the house with such stable temperatures!  And bonus, the BR crosses will be sex-linked (females solid black, males black with a white dot at hatch).  I want to get some barred birds, maybe cuckoo marans or maybe barred rocks, to add to my flock so that I can hatch sex-link chicks next year.  We hatch mostly for meat for our freezer, but I'm sure I would be able to sell pullets as layers around here and if I knew that they were female at hatch I wouldn't have to feed them out for a few weeks before selling them as layers.

Yes, that would be brilliant

 

[1muttsfan]

Candled last night, only found 5 nonstarters out of the 73 I set - although I expect to loose quite a few more of the shipped eggs as time goes by. The egg I cracked and waxed is coming along nicely. And all of the CL eggs, from my flock, are developing

 

[OzarkCountryGirl]

I missed the easter hatchalong both too early and too late as I have one batch that is due to hatch out on the 24th, then I set another dozen on 4/12. While I wouldn't mind being more on track with everyone else, I have to be content with just setting what I have, when I have it. Right now I have a half dozen baby bunnies in the nest box that won't be ready for new their homes until May 10th, missing all of easter bunny impulse buyers completely.

But that's fine with me. Besides, these bunnies are already spoken for and in fact, I'm going to be trading a couple of them for some Partridge, Blue and Black Silkie chicks.

 

[1muttsfan]

Sounds like a great deal! Better to hatch when you are ready than to be rushed or unable to attend the eggs and chicks properly.

 

[Alaskan]

I just sat and candled all of my eggs, every single one, and recorded.

There are only a very few clears, and maybe a very few either slow ones or early quitters... And I started out with 51 eggs.

One of the clears had a bit of ooze on it.... Not sure if I missed it when I set them all in the incubator, or if it is waiting to explode...but it is clearly a clear, so I pulled it.

It is TOTALLY odd though....

This is my first time to do humidity by weight. And those &@#% eggs keep loosing a bit more than they should! I now have the humidity up to 45%, which I think sounds a bit high. Anyway, I will see how they are tomorrow.

 

[AinaWGSD]

We candled for the first time Sunday night. Couldn't really tell much, thought we saw veining in most of the eggs (though some of them are so dark we didn't even bother looking once we realized the light wasn't shining through bright enough). There was one we marked as potentially clear. Candled again tonight, and saw clear signs of development in all but 3 of our 41 eggs. One of them I think is clear, the other two are probably early quitters, but they just don't seem dark enough to have the proper amount of development. We'll candle those three again this weekend and toss them if they don't look any better. On the bright side, after a few temperature spikes the first few days it seems the incubator has been holding steady at right around 99.5.

 

[Alaskan]

Steady temps is a very nice thing.

 

[Alaskan]

So how is everyone?

I tossed a few... 6 I think were either total clear or clearly dead/blood ring. Out of 50 to start.

 

[AinaWGSD]

We candled last night, lots of swimmers! The three that were questionable on Sunday were definitely without a doubt either clear or early quitters and we found one more that I am 90% sure is a quitter. Four out of 41, not bad to have 90% make it this far. My husband said he'd be happy with 50-75% hatch rate. Personally, since all of my hens have shown wear (meaning all or at least almost all of the eggs should be fertile) and they weren't shipped at all I'm hoping for 75-80%. We'll find out how we do next week I guess.

 

[1muttsfan]

I am just feeling very

, this whole incubator thing always just seems to take way longer than under a broody.