The Legbar Thread!

[ChicKat]

how many do you think per each collection time frame

Good discussion.... people are finding that there is a better hatch rate when the eggs are kept no more than about 1-week before incubation right? Let me know if I'm not.

 

[KPenley]

Is there any proof behind the eggs set later after being laid hatch more girls theory?

 

[normanack]

Good discussion.... people are finding that there is a better hatch rate when the eggs are kept no more than about 1-week before incubation right? Let me know if I'm not.

Science seems to agree with you:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20460670

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19903965

 

[GaryDean26]

Is there any proof behind the eggs set later after being laid hatch more girls theory?

I havn't found any research to proove a way of getting more girls. If you have the incubator room, you could save a few dozen eggs for 3 weeks and let us know what hatches.

I did a hatch with eggs saved for up to 3 weeks at the same time a Basque hen breeders with eggs saved up to 3 weeks. Both of us recorded how many hatch from the group of eggs that were 0-5 days old, 6-10 days old, 11-15 days old and 16-21 days old.

I ended up with four cockerels and two pullets from my 10 eggs. One pullet from the 11-21 age groups and one from the 0-10 day groups so the results were inconclusive in that that hatch ( this would probably require a sample size of several hundreds of eggs to really prove anything). The Basque hen breeder set 42 eggs and had about two dozen hatch. I DID ask her to track the male to female ratio, but since the Basque aren't an auto-sexing breed she said she would have to report back in 6 weeks which never happened. Both of us had a drop in hatch rate in the 11-21 days range of eggs. The hatch rate from the 0-10 groups were equal in both hatches. Hatch rates were also equal across the 11-21 ranges.

 

[ChicKat]

Science seems to agree with you:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20460670

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19903965

Thank YOU!!

 

[ChicKat]

Is there any proof behind the eggs set later after being laid hatch more girls theory?

As I recall, in her book Gail Damerow (Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens) said that if there were a way to tell the gender of a chick in the egg, the big egg producers would have latched on to it by now...and not troubled to hatch out males.....so from what I have heard, no way until hatch day -- for sex-links and autosexing breeds.

 

[normanack]

Apparently in the Alectura lathami (Australian brush-turkey) male embryo mortality is more likely to occur at high incubation temperatures and female, at low.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/275/1652/2703.full

We could switch to Australian brush-turkeys . . .

On second thought, I'm not sure a lot of dead eggs is much better than too many cockerels.

(And Gail is probably right -- if it could be done in industry, we'd know about it.)

 

[normanack]

And then again, there's this:

http://www.thepoultrysite.com/poultrynews/25257/changing-the-sex-ratio-in-chicken

Although even after reading the above, I'm not sure how they did it.

 

[normanack]

I did find two articles about influencing the hatch towards more cockerels. I can cite those, if you like.

and . . . I'll shut up now.

 

[ChicKat]

And then there are the people who use dowsing rods, and the ladies who dangle a key on a string and if it goes around it's one sex and if it goes back and forth then it is the other....seriously these approaches have been used. seriously.