will my buff orpingtons small egg hatch?

[animal magnet]

my 6 month old buff orpington started laying about a month ago and the eggs are very small with yolks and everything and so i put a couple in my homemade styrofoam incubator and to my suprise i saw growth in them there pretty dark eggs so i cant see much but i saw little movements and veins anyways it is now day 20 and im wondering what other people think about this do you think they will hatch and if so do you think they will be healthy?

oh and they arent the only 2 in the incubator i have 9 total that made it to lockdown im very excited and nervous as the last clutch i tried to hatch only one 2 made it to lockdown and only one hatched only to die 2 weeks later out of the blue.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Welcome to the forum! Glad you joined us!

The simple answer is they will probably be fine. I've hatched pullet eggs like that and got a fairly good hatch rate.

There is always a more complex answer. The smaller eggs do not have enough nutrients for the chicks to reach normal size. There would not be room for them in that smaller egg shell anyway if they could, so that is a good thing. It gives them a chance.

If you read the studies, you get a little higher mortality rate with those pullet eggs. I haven't found any studies where they actually tell you why, just that fewer eggs hatch and fewer chicks make it. For us just hatching a few eggs, that difference in mortality rate is not huge, maybe not even noticeable, but for commercial operations hatching tens of thousands of chicks at a time, a small change in hatch rate makes a big difference to the number of chicks that hatch.

When a pullet first starts laying, she does not always get everything just right. It sometimes takes a while for her to get all the kinks worked out of her internal egg laying factory. If yours had been laying a month, they should have had all the kinks worked out and were depositing the right things in the right amounts in the eggs. So that should not be a concern for you. It can be a concern for the first few eggs a pullet lays.

Will they be healthy when they hatch? Probably. They will not be as big as normal, but they should have all the body parts. When I hatched the pullet eggs, I used a broody. Not all the chicks that hatched made it. I don't know if that was because of a bad broody or because they were so small. But the ones that made it past the first 24 hours did great. I don't know that they ever caught up in size with chicks hatched from regular eggs, but that could have been the time of year they were raised. It was late in the year and the forage was not as great. Most of their food came from forage, not a feeder. Broodies are like that if they have the option.

With your description of them, I think you will do fine. There is always a risk with any egg hatching, not just pullet eggs. The first 24 hours should tell the tale, but I really think you will do OK. Good luck!!!

 

[animal magnet]

thank you for the info my mind is a little more at ease knowing somebody has succeeded in hatching these small eggs. i cant wait for my chicks to arrive if they arrive, i think the little buff orpingtons will be my favorite as the mother is my favorite chicken of my flock of 7 hens and 1 rooster. i am also excited to see if they look more the the father which is americauna or the mother.