Storing eggs in incubator before incubating?

[awfiwhea]

i also have never held them for more than five days before incubation.

 

[rosewellfarm]

Great, this will be a good experiment to see the percent of success based on the number of days stored. I'll post what happens in the end.

 

[lazy gardener]

I'll be setting 2 doz. eggs on Friday. The oldest one will be 11 days old. Several of them have some smears on them. I'm thinking that I may wash half of the smeared ones, and leave the rest of them dirty, for a comparison. Fired up the incubator for a test run today, and it seems to be holding steady.

 

[subhanalah]

I'm not 100% but I'm pretty sure most of the eggs that have quit, never started, or gone stinky so far for me are ones that were dirty. But I'm also getting some of the best development in some that were dirty and not rubbed too much. I think that may be what makes a difference I'll have to take better note of which eggs I have marked as being unfertile.

 

[gatorshark75]

I'm not 100% but I'm pretty sure most of the eggs that have quit, never started, or gone stinky so far for me are ones that were dirty. But I'm also getting some of the best development in some that were dirty and not rubbed too much. I think that may be what makes a difference I'll have to take better note of which eggs I have marked as being unfertile.

so your saying that a mother hen cleans her eggs before she sits on them to hatch them

 

[gatorshark75]

I'll be setting 2 doz. eggs on Friday. The oldest one will be 11 days old. Several of them have some smears on them. I'm thinking that I may wash half of the smeared ones, and leave the rest of them dirty, for a comparison. Fired up the incubator for a test run today, and it seems to be holding steady.

as long as they are a little smeared or stained they should be fine if you need to you can wipe off the large dirty areas with a damp cloth but only the immediate area not the entire egg it will clog the pores of the shell

 

[subhanalah]

No, I'm saying that these two eggs (that dies early), I tried to get off as much as I could, perhaps that caused issues. The ones that seem infertile, could very well be early quitters, from the initial cleaning, but the ones I tried to really smudge it off went really bad, really fast.

I don't mean to offend, but I don't really understand why you are asking that question. I in no way said that? Maybe my phone mistyped something that I'm missing?

 

[rosewellfarm]

I understood what you were saying. It seems spot cleaning seemed to work for you, but not really washing them hard. I've labelled the eggs for the days they were gathered, and made notes about the weather (wet/dry/cold/warm) for the days in my garden notebook, and I'm going to go ahead and try to spot clean the ones that are dirty and will mark the ones that were cleaned, so at the end, I'll have an idea of what was successful and what wasn't. Shew! Record keeping is turning out to be the most important thing for us at the farmstead.

 

[lazy gardener]

But, think of the benefits. In a fit of cleaning, I threw out my incubation notes from last year, so I have to start from scratch on figuring out how my easy to read thermometer actually relates to actual temperature. I need to look at a few spread sheets to correlate all of my info in an easy to decipher format.

 

[gatorshark75]

But, think of the benefits. In a fit of cleaning, I threw out my incubation notes from last year, so I have to start from scratch on figuring out how my easy to read thermometer actually relates to actual temperature. I need to look at a few spread sheets to correlate all of my info in an easy to decipher format.

i use multiple thermometers during incubation the most important one is the one actually laying on the eggs to get the best reading and my incubator has a easy to read temp on top of it and its almost 10 degrees off