Hi all! I'm new to this forum, it's my first time ever owning & incubating chickens so forgive me if I've made a few mistakes with my previous incubation & hatch. I just have a few questions about sanitizing my incubators & the humidity levels.
So, I'll start off with some backstory here. We ordered eggs from Greendale Heritage farm in British Columbia, the woman we ordered our hatching eggs from was very nice & a pleasure to deal with. We ordered 12 lavender orpington & 12 chocolate orpington. Once we received our eggs in the mail, we unpackaged and left in a room for 12 hours before incubation (every google search I found told me to leave them for 12-24 hours at room temperature prior to incubation). We kept our temperature at a steady 37.5 degrees Celsius for day 1-18, and a 50-55% humidity.
Lockdown came and we switched our eggs over to another incubator that we had running for awhile to warm up as it was keeping humidity better. We kept our temperature at a steady 37.5 degrees Celsius again, and our humidity fluctuated from 60-65%. On day 18 we candled our eggs to see which were growing and which had blood rings once again, we ended up having around 12-10 eggs that were good. There were probably 3 eggs that we could see shaking and wobbling, which we thought for sure were good and going to hatch. Unfortunately we only got 2 chicks out of 24 eggs, and those eggs were ones that had zero shaking or wobbling.
Our first egg that hatched, ended up cutting his wing on what we think is the fan in our incubator. The set up in our incubators aren't great because of the fan location, as they're located on both sides and easy to get its wing caught in there. It's not something we thought about before hatching, so we didn't have the screen made up in time to cover them. We had to open our incubator, and take our chick out and put into the brooder under the light. (She's doing great, shes our little survivor lol). Flash ahead to the next day, and our second lavender started to hatch. We had to quickly put the screens inside the incubator to cover the fans once it did hatch so it wouldn't happen again. Is it possible this opening of the incubator caused the chicks not to die? We are devastated that we only got two chicks out of this, especially since the others seemed to be doing great and we thought for sure would hatch. We have an elite mystery box coming from breezy bird farms, so we're hoping that this hatch rate will be better. We want to get much more informed and educated this time around.
My questions are, what do you all think could've happened that caused the chicks to die? What humidity levels do you keep your incubators at for day 1-18, and lockdown period? Also, what should I use to sanitize my incubators our eggs arrive?
So sorry for this long post. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!
So, I'll start off with some backstory here. We ordered eggs from Greendale Heritage farm in British Columbia, the woman we ordered our hatching eggs from was very nice & a pleasure to deal with. We ordered 12 lavender orpington & 12 chocolate orpington. Once we received our eggs in the mail, we unpackaged and left in a room for 12 hours before incubation (every google search I found told me to leave them for 12-24 hours at room temperature prior to incubation). We kept our temperature at a steady 37.5 degrees Celsius for day 1-18, and a 50-55% humidity.
Lockdown came and we switched our eggs over to another incubator that we had running for awhile to warm up as it was keeping humidity better. We kept our temperature at a steady 37.5 degrees Celsius again, and our humidity fluctuated from 60-65%. On day 18 we candled our eggs to see which were growing and which had blood rings once again, we ended up having around 12-10 eggs that were good. There were probably 3 eggs that we could see shaking and wobbling, which we thought for sure were good and going to hatch. Unfortunately we only got 2 chicks out of 24 eggs, and those eggs were ones that had zero shaking or wobbling.
Our first egg that hatched, ended up cutting his wing on what we think is the fan in our incubator. The set up in our incubators aren't great because of the fan location, as they're located on both sides and easy to get its wing caught in there. It's not something we thought about before hatching, so we didn't have the screen made up in time to cover them. We had to open our incubator, and take our chick out and put into the brooder under the light. (She's doing great, shes our little survivor lol). Flash ahead to the next day, and our second lavender started to hatch. We had to quickly put the screens inside the incubator to cover the fans once it did hatch so it wouldn't happen again. Is it possible this opening of the incubator caused the chicks not to die? We are devastated that we only got two chicks out of this, especially since the others seemed to be doing great and we thought for sure would hatch. We have an elite mystery box coming from breezy bird farms, so we're hoping that this hatch rate will be better. We want to get much more informed and educated this time around.
My questions are, what do you all think could've happened that caused the chicks to die? What humidity levels do you keep your incubators at for day 1-18, and lockdown period? Also, what should I use to sanitize my incubators our eggs arrive?
So sorry for this long post. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!
