nest box bottoms - screened vs solid?

[Ridgerunner]

I would not want to clean egg contents off wire or the floor beneath.
Have had lots of broken eggs in nests with a serial softshell layer here.
You'd need a very deep nest bedding of straw/hay/whatever to soak up all the liquid.
and train the hens not to scratch down to bottom of nest anyway...lol!

I see no functional advantage to wire bottom nests, even if they did do that 100 year ago.
I'm just full of italics this morning

Aart, you know me. If I had a serial soft shell layer she would not be around long. I'm surprised you are keeping her but i don't know your motivations. It's not always that easy to figure out which one it is though, I can appreciate that. I can also see your frustration if you are getting a lot of broken eggs.

I don't have many broken eggs. When I do, clean-up is usually just grabbing the top part of my "hay" and tossing that in the compost. As long as I keep enough "hay" in the nests they don't scratch to the bottom, maybe the longer fibers has something to do with that. If I don't keep tossing fresh stuff in there it does get shredded to the point they can reach the bottom. Even then I hardly ever get cracked eggs let alone broken ones.

My conclusion was that I don't see any functional advantage of wire bottomed nests the way I use them. I also don't see any functional disadvantage the way I use them. In my opinion this is like many other things on here that people have different opinions about as they strive for the "best". In some unique situations one way may be "best" for them, but for many of us there is no real best. There are just different ways to achieve outstanding results.

 

[cmom]

When I had hay in my nest boxes with the wire bottoms or milk crates I had no problems either but you are correct that you must have quite a bit of hay in them. Every once in awhile I scrape out the nest boxes and put fresh shavings in them and the shavings go into my compost. Now I spay the coops once a month with Permethrin spray since I had my first mites this past spring. No more mites so far but then I never had them before last spring. I only found them in one coop but sprayed them all as a preventative hoping they wouldn't spread.

 

[aart]

Aart, you know me. If I had a serial soft shell layer she would not be around long. I'm surprised you are keeping her but i don't know your motivations. It's not always that easy to figure out which one it is though, I can appreciate that.

Oh, I knew who..and tried to 'fix it'..but eventually she and another 'troublemaker' went to the processor. I didn't put up with it for too long.