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A blood ring means the the peep has died, so yes, it does count against the hatch rate. The blood ring is formed when the embryo dies and the blood pools in a ring.
Today was day 7 for me, so I candled for the 1st time ever (can you say, stressful?!).
I made my candler from a small headlamp with bright LED lights; I just wrapped it with some black electrical tape to help direct the light beam:
DH was kind enough to turn off the living room lights and the Masters golf tournament on TV and help me look for the floating "spiders". Talk about thrilling, it was so cool to see the first chick swimming around! The egg below on the left was an unfertilized store-bought egg, and the one on the right was one of my 7 day SPR eggs. It's not a great pic, but the eye is where the arrow is pointing, and he was dancing around!
My light wasn't strong enough to see through the Welsummer eggs (except 1), so my candling results were:
8 Silver Penciled Plymouth Rock eggs - 5 good
2 possible blood rings
1 not sure
12 Welsummer eggs - 1 good
11 too dark to see, but they should be good
No eggs have an odor, so I'm leaving all in the 'bator and will recandle on day 14. I have the airhole open and sniff it each time I check the eggs.
I think two may be blood rings because the thin line that I see in them is pinkish red, goes around the shell, and the "shadow" in the egg seems to sink as I slowly turn the egg. I've marked them and will keep a close eye (or nose!) on them.
Woohooo! Sunnychic! Isn't that just the coolest thing ever to see them wiggling in the shell?! Loved your pics. I'm a visual kind of gal so bring on more piccys everybody!
On another note, I'm hunkered down in my hallway. The tornado sirens are going off and if my house gets hit, or electricity goes off and I lose a chick because of this, I'm going to be mighty mad!
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8 eggs set minus 2 culled eggs = 6 with 3 winners. 3/6 = 50%
Good job!
You need to count the quitter against your hatch rate. That means that 7 out of 8 were fertile. 3 divided by 7 = 43% rate. Remember that if one quits, that does count against your hatch rate.
I changed a couple of the percentages on the first page, folks. You are not counting the quitters/blood rings against your rate and you need to. If you have 8 eggs, one is infertile (never developed at all), then you are starting with 7 fertile eggs. If 3 hatch, that is a 43% rate, not 50%. You do not count infertiles at all and quitters mean they were fertile, but died.
Doesnt matter when you find out an egg was never fertile, you subtract it from the original total you started with--it doesn't count as even being in the bator.
