Okay, that's my grand staggered hatching experiment over. (Finally!) Four chicks hatched over a 32 hour period, and the other four didn't do anything. My experience with these eggs is that if they're going to hatch, they hatch quickly, all together and pretty much on time. So as soon as the fourth one was all fluffed up and I could see I had no more pips, I pulled the last four eggs out and candled, then float tested, then just broke them open. They were almost fully developed but died before pipping internally. I think I'm going to put the hiigh death rate down to the highly unsanitary incubator conditions, as it's really pretty stinky in there by now...
So I have 12 chicks in total. Here's the final breakdown:
Of 24 eggs in total that I set, 22 were fertile. (She hadn't laid for two months before Xmas so I'm not surprised that the first couple of eggs she laid after her winter break were duds. When I break them open now, fertility is 100%. Woohoo!)
Of the 22 fertile eggs, I'm not going to count the one that got bashed. That was just random bad luck.
So my overall hatch rate was 12/21, or 57%.
First batch of eggs I got 5/6 , or 83%. Second batch of eggs I got 3/6, or 50%. Third batch of eggs I got 4/9, or 44%. The lower hatch rates could be due to the extreme fluctuations in humidity for the second and third batches of eggs between days 3 and 10 of their incubation, or it could be due to the increasingly grubby state of my incubator after each hatch.
Interestingly, I didn't notice any big difference in hatch rates between fresh eggs and eggs that had been stored for a fortnight. In the first two batches, the two oldest eggs hatched while others didn't. In the third batch, the second oldest egg hatched while the two freshest ones didn't. Next experiment will be with even older eggs I think!
The washing/not washing thing: I rinsed some eggs in hot water, I washed some in a hot dilute bleach solution before rinsing them, and I left some unwashed. This one is hard to call though, as I rinsed all of the first batch of eggs, which obviously had the most ideal and cleanest incubating conditions, and I only bleached one egg in the last batch, which obviously had the worst conditions. Fot the second and third batch, I alternated rinsing/not washing with each egg as it was collected, so the results should not be affected by the age of the eggs.
Yes, of course the results are still skewed. But here they are anyway:
First batch of eggs: Of 6 rinsed in hot water - 5 hatched, 1 was DIS with no internal pip
Second batch of eggs: Of 3 bleached - 2 hatched, 1 had blood ring.
Of 3 not washed - 1 hatched, 1 was early quitter, 1 was DIS with no internal pip
Third batch of eggs: Of 1 bleached - 1 hatched
Of 4 rinsed - 2 hatched, 2 were DIS with no internal pip
Of 4 not washed - 1 hatched, 1 had a blood ring, 2 were DIS with no internal pip.
So if you discount the first batch and just look at the second and third batches, cause their incubating conditions were similarly non-ideal, I had 4 eggs each of bleached, rinsed and unwashed. The hatch rates were 3/4 for the bleached ones, 2/4 for the rinsed ones, and 1/4 for the unwashed ones. Obviously that's far too small a test number to be able to say anything much about anything, and the experiment had loads of other variables anyway, but those results are interesting enough that I think I'll be doing more experiments with washing at some point in the future.
Now then... Is anyone still reading this? Or am I waffling away to myself?
I bet if there's anyone still here, you're just hanging on for some pictures, aren't you? LOL!
Okay, here are the last four little fuzzybutts:
Whoops! Edited cause I got some of my sums wrong...
