Hi y'all, I haven't posted here in awhile but I have a question...
Earlier this year my cousin and I added six new hens to our flock. Our previous flock had died out except for one, for various and vague reasons we couldn't identify... The girl we have left from the original group, Frances, is a beautiful Cream Legbar who lays greenish-blue eggs.
Anyhow, our six new girls are all seven months old, and only three of them are laying-- our Cherry Egger, Renee, our Barred Plymouth Rock, Polly, and our Buff Orpington, Joanne.
The young three, a Salmon Faverolle (Sally), a Columbian Wyandotte (Agnes), and a Speckled Sussex (Susie) have yet to begin laying.
Also, Frances has stopped laying. We had to bring her in for about two months in the summer because of a terrible case of bumblefoot, and she hadn't laid an egg since. Is she not laying because she's been ousted as queen of the flock (overthrown by fiesty Renee)?
Is there something dietary I'm not taking into account? They're free-range foragers who are fed a diet of Kalmbach organic layer crumbles mixed with Scratch and Peck organic layer feed (roughly 50/50 mix), given mealworms and sunworms as a snack along with Manna Pro Spring and Harvest mixes, and crushed eggshells for a calcium supplement (we're probably going to switch to oyster shells as their production slows in the winter).
Is there something else we could be doing? Or is it just a matter of patience?
Earlier this year my cousin and I added six new hens to our flock. Our previous flock had died out except for one, for various and vague reasons we couldn't identify... The girl we have left from the original group, Frances, is a beautiful Cream Legbar who lays greenish-blue eggs.
Anyhow, our six new girls are all seven months old, and only three of them are laying-- our Cherry Egger, Renee, our Barred Plymouth Rock, Polly, and our Buff Orpington, Joanne.
The young three, a Salmon Faverolle (Sally), a Columbian Wyandotte (Agnes), and a Speckled Sussex (Susie) have yet to begin laying.
Also, Frances has stopped laying. We had to bring her in for about two months in the summer because of a terrible case of bumblefoot, and she hadn't laid an egg since. Is she not laying because she's been ousted as queen of the flock (overthrown by fiesty Renee)?
Is there something dietary I'm not taking into account? They're free-range foragers who are fed a diet of Kalmbach organic layer crumbles mixed with Scratch and Peck organic layer feed (roughly 50/50 mix), given mealworms and sunworms as a snack along with Manna Pro Spring and Harvest mixes, and crushed eggshells for a calcium supplement (we're probably going to switch to oyster shells as their production slows in the winter).
Is there something else we could be doing? Or is it just a matter of patience?