Olive Egger and egg color

[JadeFarms]

It’s annoying when your OEs don’t lay olive eggs. Mine lays brown eggs, it’s a legbar cross “olive egger” I bred a ameraucana to a maran to hopefully get some OE.

 

[Meg-in-MT]

Oh, the color selection is soooo amazing!

I love all the different colors! Thank you!

 

[Meg-in-MT]

It’s annoying when your OEs don’t lay olive eggs. Mine lays brown eggs, it’s a legbar cross “olive egger” I bred a ameraucana to a maran to hopefully get some OE.

Are you incubating or letting a broody hatch? Maybe they've already hatched, but I'd love to see what you get.

 

[JadeFarms]

Are you incubating or letting a broody hatch? Maybe they've already hatched, but I'd love to see what you get.

They hatched and 2 are about a week old. I will go out after breakfast and take some pics of them.

 

[Allsfairinloveandbugs]

You have some beautiful eggs , meg in mt!!! Re the olive eggs, the 2nd from top & 4th from top look very similiar to my easter egger/cuckoo marans crosses. Many might say those are olive eggs. Maybe not Dark olive, but still an olive shade. i havent researched if there exists a chart rating olive egg colors, same as there is for ameraucana blues & marans dark brown egg shades. If not, there should be! I dont have any black copper marans hens, because i was very happy with the original welsummers. On that note, where did u get your copper marans from? If from a hatchery, they are an impressively dark shade. And i will probably like to order some! The way i keep pure breeds in the flocks without having to raise inside in a brooder, or keep multiple seperate breeding pens, is when a hen goes broody, i give her the eggs i want her to hatch, & purchase hatchery chicks to coincide with her hatch date. Slip the hatchery chicks underneath her at night as soon as all her chicks have hatched, & let her raise the adoptees too. As of today, still have FOUR broody hens settin on eggs. (Done with hatchery chicks this late in the year.) I decided to end this years broody season by giving them mostly all blue eggs. Its really fun to select the biggest brightest blues, the biggest prettiest greens, & the biggest darkest browns. Do u have an ameraucana roo and/or or a black copper maran roo? If so, u have a great foundation of colors to create your very own DARK olive eggers. U just need an incubator, feathered or otherwise. Fyi i was packaging a large order of eggs last night. I didnt get any eggs this week from the older welsummers i still have, but their daughters did lay some very dark olive eggs . I usually sell all the eggs, but last night i set some of the dark olive eggs aside for a pic. (Havent taken pic yet and wont have time to do so until this weekend). Plus i have some welsummer eggs i previously blew out and preserved, with their dark brown shades & even darker brown speckles. Really neat they produced daughters that lay dark olive eggs with dark brown speckles. Anyway, sending u lots of encouragement to use the beautiful shades of eggs you already have to create the shades u still desire.

 

[Meg-in-MT]

Thank you for your kind words!

I do not have a Marans or Ameraucana rooster. I have tossed around the idea of trying to find a quality Marans to introduce to the hatchery (Meyer hatchery, August '19) girls that I've got because of how nice the eggs already are. It would be fun to create a breeding program, though I'd have to set up a breeding pen for them. The coop the hens are currently in has a resident rooster that I don't care to get rid of. He's got a great temperament. That's not to say I couldn't have two in the coop, but it may be a crapshoot whether or not they'd mate up. Although, chickens are incredibly clique-y...

Which breed of rooster did you have over the welsummer to get the dark olive eggs? I've seen pictures of some very dark olive eggs. I just love those. I hope you'll share pictures when you take them!

 

[Allsfairinloveandbugs]

Re the roosters i used, heres how it started. I fell in love with pics of ameraucanas with their cute fuzzy cheeks and feathery beards, & had to have some. Got 30 "ameraucana" sexed pullets from ideal hatchery. (Last time i looked at their website, it still insists they have purebred ameraucanas, but some of the ones i got were clean faced, & some eventually laid green eggs. So they were Easter eggers, which left me a bit disappointed at first, but content with.) When the pullets reached about 14 weeks old, one of the "pullets" started crowing. Then another, til i had 4 crowing easter egger" pullets." Then the Real pullets started laying eggs, 2/3 beautiful blue, the rest green. Then starting 7-8 months, those same easter egger pullets started going broody. Several times a year. (They still do at age 6. One has chicks as i speak, & shes already raised one brood this year. Several others from those originals have also raised chicks this year.) i used the 4 original accidental Easter Egger roosters, and gave the broody hens ONly the biggest & blue-est eggs to hatch. Repeated that for a couple years, & only kept resulting roos, hatched from blue eggs. So became pretty confident that most of the roos carried double blue egg genes, since 90-95% of the daughters, grandaughters & great grand daughters laid blue eggs Continued to use the easter egger roos from blue eggs to hatch various breeds that laid brown eggs too, to make varying shades of green. Including the dark olive green with dark brown speckles. As i tell people that admire all the different egg shades and colors, my girls are very talented painters and artists. I think u would likely have sucess getting a marans roo from meyer hatchery since thats where your hens came from. If u want to be sure of getting Only marans chicks, then would yes be necessary to make seperate breeding pen. But if doing so is too much trouble, even if u kept the roos together (assuming your older roo would even allow the younger marans to share his space, and that the older hens would accept the young marans roo), u would def get Some pure marans eggs. Def creates more work, & only u can decide if u want to go that route as a personal challenge to see what u get!

 

[Minky]

I hope you'll post pictures when they start laying. I get a couple fairly good olives, but I've seen way darker ones. I'm not sure who's laying the nice dark brown egg, either welsummer or bcm. Pretty certain it's the bcm.

I need to set up some cams to catch them.

You should be able to tell the welsummer eggs from the marans eggs by the shape. see mine below. Both from pullets. BCM is 21 weeks, Welsummer mix 18 weeks old. Marans have no pointy end.

 

[Meg-in-MT]

Re the roosters i used, heres how it started. I fell in love with pics of ameraucanas with their cute fuzzy cheeks and feathery beards, & had to have some. Got 30 "ameraucana" sexed pullets from ideal hatchery. (Last time i looked at their website, it still insists they have purebred ameraucanas, but some of the ones i got were clean faced, & some eventually laid green eggs. So they were Easter eggers, which left me a bit disappointed at first, but content with.) When the pullets reached about 14 weeks old, one of the "pullets" started crowing. Then another, til i had 4 crowing easter egger" pullets." Then the Real pullets started laying eggs, 2/3 beautiful blue, the rest green. Then starting 7-8 months, those same easter egger pullets started going broody. Several times a year. (They still do at age 6. One has chicks as i speak, & shes already raised one brood this year. Several others from those originals have also raised chicks this year.) i used the 4 original accidental Easter Egger roosters, and gave the broody hens ONly the biggest & blue-est eggs to hatch. Repeated that for a couple years, & only kept resulting roos, hatched from blue eggs. So became pretty confident that most of the roos carried double blue egg genes, since 90-95% of the daughters, grandaughters & great grand daughters laid blue eggs Continued to use the easter egger roos from blue eggs to hatch various breeds that laid brown eggs too, to make varying shades of green. Including the dark olive green with dark brown speckles. As i tell people that admire all the different egg shades and colors, my girls are very talented painters and artists. I think u would likely have sucess getting a marans roo from meyer hatchery since thats where your hens came from. If u want to be sure of getting Only marans chicks, then would yes be necessary to make seperate breeding pen. But if doing so is too much trouble, even if u kept the roos together (assuming your older roo would even allow the younger marans to share his space, and that the older hens would accept the young marans roo), u would def get Some pure marans eggs. Def creates more work, & only u can decide if u want to go that route as a personal challenge to see what u get!

That sounds like a fun project. Do you have pictures of your eggs? I'd love to see them.

I go back and forth about project breeding. One thing, I need to read a lot more before I really start anything. Second thing, I need to figure out what I really want out of it. Instead of wanting all of the things

I've never intentionally bought a rooster, so I'd like to get one for a specific purpose, whatever that ends up being. But a Marans breeding pen would be a lot of fun.

 

[Meg-in-MT]

You should be able to tell the welsummer eggs from the marans eggs by the shape. see mine below. Both from pullets. BCM is 21 weeks, Welsummer mix 18 weeks old. Marans have no pointy end.
View attachment 2365760

Those eggs are beautiful! I'm surprised how much darker your welsummers are. I haven't heard of the Marans being more round before, is that fairly common?