new guinea mom here

[wskline]

We bought 4 guineas few months ago and are now incubating eggs. Question is, can you handle eggs too much? I'm so addicted to incubating and the process of hatching the eggs. We have 5 that I see activity in so I'm holding my breath hoping for at least 1 to hatch. We have them in Little Giant Incubater. I candle with a flash light but seriously thinking of getting egg candler. We have 1 huge egg that we call the golden egg and i did see 2 masses but now I'm seeing what I think they call death ring

 

[huntseat]

Yes, you can candle too much. By too much I mean that you can cook the egg with the light if it gets hot and you can overstimulate the embryo.

I'm not sure what effect it would have on the keet because they are pretty wild already.

I candled mine everyday but did half one day and the other half the next. Wash your hands both before and after.

 

[wskline]

Thank you huntseat
Even though I'm excited and want to keep looking at eggs, I will control myself and only do couple times just to make sure eggs coming along. I just bought a Cool-lite egg candler thinking that would be better for checking eggs than regular flashlight.
Another question for you....can you wipe the eggs off before putting in incubator? Some come out of pen kinda gross.

 

[huntseat]

A quick search here will result in a common belief that dirty eggs shouldn't be incubated. If you can't lightly wipe the dirt off then it most likely won't end well. Wetting the surface of the egg removes the protective 'bloom' that keeps bacteria out. Rubbing the dirt off can drive it down into the pores and ruin the egg.

Most say just put the cleanest eggs you have in the incubator and don't mess with them. Incubators are warm and moist so just about everything good and bad will grow inside one.

Use your nose, if you get a smelly egg remove it before it explodes and sprays the other eggs with bacteria. They are ticking stink bombs and the sound is said to be memorable when they explode.

Don't forget to clean your incubator between hatches.

All this being said there are people that use sanitizing methods for very valuable eggs, I don't have expensive birds and should never be in this situation but the info is out there if you do some digging.

Wish you the best! Use this website it's quite a resource!