Must I collect?

[Smorz]

Can I just count back, say 7 days, grab those eggs and add them to the incubator? The nest has eggs in it from 16 days ago. Obviously a lot are no good. I'm going to pull the old ones. Should I just start collecting and adding to a carton or can they go to the incubator all together straight from the nest?

 

[Kelsie2290]

Really no reason not to take all 16 of them and put them in the incubator at the same time, if you want the potential extra chicks. The older eggs will have less of a chance of hatching, but 16 days is not really that old ... (if the nest is in a good spot so the eggs haven't been kept in iffy conditions (ie not on the ground getting wet etc) the hatch% should still be pretty good).

 

[Smorz]

Thanks for the reply! So really? I thought only about 10 days remained viable. But, regardless, you are saying I CAN just pull them from the nest even though they haven't been officially "turned"?

 

[Kelsie2290]

When hens add new eggs to the nest, they usually spend awhile rearranging things, so the eggs have been "turned" by mother nature
Some of them will usually remain viable after ten days (assuming the storage conditions were decent), your hatch percentage just goes down the older they get. If you do a search, people have incubated some pretty old eggs like the Trader Joe-type eggs from the grocery store, shipped eggs, and just eggs they collected and didn't get around to setting, and had chicks hatch.