I need help! So, I had a BCM hen go broody. I was really excited about it, and put 7 eggs under her, one being a blue egg. Well, She DEMOLISHED that blue egg, and soiled the nest. I had to throw away 4 eggs that had gotten really dirtied, and replaced them with new eggs, ( all brown this time!) My Question is, she went broody on Saturday. So the eggs have a 4 day difference. Will this cause any problems? Only 3 original eggs are left. The rest are new. Any advice?
And people say animals are color blind!!! I wonder if she destroyed it because it was so different from the other 6, or because she knew that it wasn't her egg because of the color? I wonder if she would have done that if all the eggs had been blue? Interesting behavior. Most broodies will hatch anything you put under them, but maybe she's more discriminating.
A staggered hatch that is more than 2-3 days apart is never desirable, as the broody will need to chose between leaving the unhatched eggs to take care of the chicks, or staying on the late eggs and hope the chicks can take care of themselves. Typically 3 days is the maximum, but not all broodies read the book. Did you mark which eggs are the original and which are the new one?
Since you have this situation, you have a few options:
First, if you have an incubator, or can borrow/buy an incubator, you can finish out the late-hatching eggs in the incubator, then try to graft those chicks back to her when they're one day old. The problem is that the other chicks will then be 5 days old, if everyone hatches on time, so the hen may not accept new chicks that late, or the age difference between the chicks may be too much and the younger babies could get injured if the older chicks are aggressive.
Second, if you have another hen go broody you can have the second hen finish out the newer eggs.
Third, if you finish out the newer eggs in the incubator and don't want to graft them on to the broody, you can always brood them separately.
Fourth, you can wait and see what happens, and accept that the embyros in the newer eggs will die on day 18-21 of development if the hen leaves the nest before they hatch to take care of the early chicks.
Fifth, if you marked the older or newer eggs so you can tell them apart, you can remove one group of eggs now, or when they're first candled, either to an incubator or to another broody hen, or destroy them. I have a friend that candles all her eggs, then removes and boils the ones that aren't developing and feeds them back to the chickens. She doesn't like any egg to go to waste.
I can't think of any other options. Sorry. Maybe some of the more experienced poster will have a better option for you. Please keep us posted as to how this turns out.
