New to chickens, and have a question.

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NirvanaNicole

NirvanaNicole

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Hi there. I just joined this site because I will be ordering some chicks soon. I live on a fenced in acre and have a large block shed I plan on converting to a chicken coop. I want chickens so I can have fresh eggs, as well as for breeding them and having the offspring for meat. for my first order of chicks I plan on buying 10 females and 1 male. I have read that that is a good ratio. From my understanding it's best to collect the eggs everyday. So here is the part I don't understand. If I want to collect the non fertilized eggs to eat everyday and remove the fertilized eggs to put in an incubator and hatch; how do I know if a freshly laid egg has been fertilized or not? I don't want to accidentally eat a fertilized egg and I don't want to put random eggs in an incubator to find out eventually which ones were fertilized, because then the non fertilized ones will probably have to be thrown out and will be wasting an egg I could have eaten. I have seen the candling technique done on an 8 day old egg. Can candling be done sooner than 8 days? If the soonest you can do candling is 8 days would it be ok to leave all the eggs in with the chickens until they are 8 days old then check the status of them? My main question is, is there a way I could collect new eggs and check the new eggs for fertilization in the same day everyday? What is the best way to go about this?
Thank you.
 
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Welcome to BYC!

There is no way of telling if an egg is fertile unless you crack it open. So when you keep a rooster, most of your eggs are going to be fertile. If you want non fertile eating eggs, you would need to keep a separate flock just for these eggs. When incubating, you always set more than you will need as not all eggs are fertile. And yes, you have a good ratio of rooster to hens at 1 to 10.

Good luck establishing your new flock and welcome to ours!
 
If you want to breed chickens, you will be eating fertilized eggs. This may sounds gross but remember they do not begin to develop into anything until incubated so it makes no difference, you cannot tell a fertilised egg for an unfertilised egg without cracking it open. ANYBODY who eats eggs from hens who have a cockerel present is eating potentially fertilised eggs...this is normal.

If you then want to incubate, you set your eggs or put them under a broody hen and when you candle, you are doing it to determine the viability of those eggs as future chicks and any that are not developed need to be binned, not eaten. Candling an egg that has not been incubated by hen or by machine will tell you nothing at all other than if the egg shell is porous. So an 8 day old non incubated egg will look no different from a fresh one or a six week old one.
 
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If you have one rooster with 10 hens, most likely all the eggs will be fertile. There is no reason not to eat them, either way. You can tell when you crack them to eat whether they are fertile: https://www.backyardchickens.com/t/16008/how-to-tell-a-fertile-vs-infertile-egg-pictures/0_20 The only ways to tell whether a particular egg is fertile is to crack it and see this spot on the olk, and to incubate it.

Look at the threads linked in the sticky (blue box) in the Incubating forum, here, for all about candling and other things having to do with incubating: https://www.backyardchickens.com/f/5/incubating-hatching-eggs

It's best to collect eggs daily if only because they are likely to get knocked aorund and broken otherwise. If you collect them for about a week on your counter, turning daily, til you have enough to hatch, then incubate, they should all hatch around the same time.


You could also get a couple of breeds like game hens, Silkies or Kraienkoppes that are likely to go broody, and save yourself a lot of work by having the hen hatch and raise the chicks:

http://www.themodernhomestead.us/article/broody-hens-1.html
 
yea, if you have a rooster then all the eggs from hens that are in the same pen as the rooster will be laying fertilized eggs. as far as "eating a fertilized egg"... you won't be able to tell the difference between a fertilized eggs and a non fert egg. the eggs have to be raised in temperature up to around 99* for a few days before there is any development. so you can take fert eggs out of the coop everyday and keep them on your counter top for a month and when you went to eat it, it would look just like a store bought egg... well, BETTER than a store bought
 
Welcome to the site. I've no experience in the area of chickens that involves hatching from eggs. Others have answered for you though. Enjoy your time here, best of luck with your chooks.
 

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