Setting Eggs 12/28 - Hatching Buddies? Hatch-Along

[farmgirl44]

can i join in?? i set eggs on the 21st and 23rd.

i also have lav. orp eggs!!! 14 set on the 21st!! i hope hope hope

we all get some lav orp babies!!

i also set 8 blue swedish duck eggs on the 21st and 10 showgirl eggs on the 23rd!!

all my eggs are in a brinsea 20 eco. i have 6 eggs stacked on top of the others, lol, i'm gonna candle tonight and see how many are viable

 

[hokankai]

I'm incubating for the first time starting this Sunday, and will just be using some of my hens' eggs for an initial trial run. I'm going to be trying the dry incubation method in my 1588 Genesis and see how it goes

 

[chickenbelle]

Im actually kind of up in the air on the marans that i won on ebay....i thought i was bidding on a different auction but the eggs werent as dark in the pics as i had hoped....so i may choose a few of the darkest and set those.

It is late in the season for the Marans. Their eggs lighten as they keep laying. They may still be great dark egg layers, just losing a little coloration for now. I'd hatch them all!

 

[chickenbelle]

Fingers crossed for everyone!

 

[DraigAthar]

Yay for all the eggs we're incubating! So many lovely breeds, too. I just set mine tonight, 16 eggs from four different hens. Farmgirl44, of course you can join in! Hokankai, I tried the dry incubation method over the summer on one hatch. It was a complete disaster. Every chick was completely shrink-wrapped inside the egg, even though the ambient room humidity was high and the reading inside the incubator was always within acceptable range. Only one chick hatched unassisted. I managed to help half of the rest of them out, the other half died in the shell, fully grown but stuck. One of the assisted ones died a few days after hatching. I was so sad, it was a terrible experience. I'm not completely new to hatching, so I do have an inkling of what I am doing. Either I botched it somehow entirely, or dry incubation simply doesn't work for me. I will never try it again. Hope you have a better experience with it than I did.

For this hatch, I am going to try weighing my eggs and track the appropriateness of the humidity that way. In the past, I have candled regularly and drawn the outline of the air sac on the shell with a pencil to watch its progress as a way to gauge proper humidity. But weighing them is supposed to be the best way to know if they are drying out too quickly or slowly. So I bought a small gram scale, it weighs up to 150g in 0.1g increments. I weighed every egg tonight before I set them and wrote the starting weight on the side of the egg (and also in my spreadsheet). They are supposed to lose 13-15% of their weight by the time they hatch, so I did the math and figured out how much each egg should weigh at the end of each week, and I will weigh each of them again when I candle to see how they are doing. We'll see how it works!

 

[farmgirl44]

Yay for all the eggs we're incubating! So many lovely breeds, too. I just set mine tonight, 16 eggs from four different hens. Farmgirl44, of course you can join in! Hokankai, I tried the dry incubation method over the summer on one hatch. It was a complete disaster. Every chick was completely shrink-wrapped inside the egg, even though the ambient room humidity was high and the reading inside the incubator was always within acceptable range. Only one chick hatched unassisted. I managed to help half of the rest of them out, the other half died in the shell, fully grown but stuck. One of the assisted ones died a few days after hatching. I was so sad, it was a terrible experience. I'm not completely new to hatching, so I do have an inkling of what I am doing. Either I botched it somehow entirely, or dry incubation simply doesn't work for me. I will never try it again. Hope you have a better experience with it than I did.

For this hatch, I am going to try weighing my eggs and track the appropriateness of the humidity that way. In the past, I have candled regularly and drawn the outline of the air sac on the shell with a pencil to watch its progress as a way to gauge proper humidity. But weighing them is supposed to be the best way to know if they are drying out too quickly or slowly. So I bought a small gram scale, it weighs up to 150g in 0.1g increments. I weighed every egg tonight before I set them and wrote the starting weight on the side of the egg (and also in my spreadsheet). They are supposed to lose 13-15% of their weight by the time they hatch, so I did the math and figured out how much each egg should weigh at the end of each week, and I will weigh each of them again when I candle to see how they are doing. We'll see how it works!

Let me know how the weighing thing is going, i've been curious about it, but didn't know how accurate it was or how to apply it to my eggs.

 

[farmgirl44]

I'm so excited to have hatching buddies!!

Just candled my eggs: i have 5 blue swedish growing, 6 showgirls and 12 lav orps!!

 

[hokankai]

Did you follow the dry incubation method that's somewhere posted on here? The humidity in our house is about 20% right now because we have a pellet stove, so I might not be able to do it. I might just try following the directions that came with it first...I'm not sure. The dry hatch method says to have the room around 50-75% humidity and I can't do that so I might have to skip it.

I went out to put the chickens in for the night and found one of my best layers missing her head

. I'm going to hatch some of her eggs because she was such a sweet girl.

 

[farmgirl44]

Nope, I have my humidity between 45-55%

So sorry about your hen, it's so sad to lose them, hope you can hatch some of her eggs

 

[eggorthechicken]

sorry about your hen...do you know what got it? I lost my little white silkie to what I think was a possum...possum died the next day of gunshot wound...anyhoo she was so sweet...I called her q-tip...but she was a loner and couldnt see well...an easy target for sure. I took in a stray dog months ago and she ended up killing 4 of mine...2 of which were my fav little cochin roos...I still miss them boys....so sweet. needless to say I rehomed her. I have an aussie and she doesnt bother them now that they are older and try to stalk her but when they are chicks she thinks they are hers