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!
we all get some lav orp babies!!
