Unfertile eggs vs damaged eggs

Dipsy, I am no specialist so take my comment for what it is worth, which is exactly what you are being charged for it, nuttin. This chart comes from a Hatchery. the eggs are gathered from various places, trucked, or even flown to the hatchery etc. carted around and handled by various people. basically non of this is done with tender loving care. so the eggs have most likely been bumped and jostled to some degree. So just like shipped eggs they need anywhere from several hours to a day or more to just set pointed end down and allow the yolk to return to the middle of the egg and everything to basically settle back into place. nothing much happens int he egg until it reaches some temperature, I am not exactly sure just what temperature that is but I guess it is in the high 90 degrees. then all the Genetic soup switches on and chick begins to grow. once that happens nothing can stop it without resulting in the death of the embryo. Egg parts still moving around once the soup starts to activate can cause the embryo to fail. At best that is my imagined explanation of why it is important to have adequate settling time for the egg. as far as what time is adequate. I have read anything from 6 to 7 hours to 24 hours from various sources. Just another of those things you have to try and try again until you find what works best for you.
 
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Thank you for the link to that chart and it has a lot of great information. I do have good to great hatches with my own eggs and incubator. I was looking for information to help with the problems of shipping and customer's ending up with clear eggs. I hope to sell more fertile eggs next year with many being shipped. I keep seeing so many complaints against breeders about clears and unfertile eggs. My chickens are a joyfull and stress relieving hobby for me, I can see how selling and shipping eggs could ruin that for me. Especially if I get to caught up in hatch rates.
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Great advise! I love the break down you gave about who is responsible for the different incubation problems. It is true there are so many factors involved with incubating eggs in general without even considering shipping issues. I have my last hatch in the bator for the year. I lost my rooster and I'm trying to incubate the last potentially fertile eggs. I all ready know of several problems that will reduce my normally great hatch rate.

1) very old eggs... some eggs are 2+ weeks old
2) no roo for 2+ weeks
3) my normally cool storage area had higher than normal temps approaching 80 degrees during the last days of storage.

But, since these are my own eggs I'll be happy to get just a few chicks out of them. It will be interesting to see how many develop.
 

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