It all started a while back. I was on vacation and had asked my mother in law to come by and check on the chickens and get the eggs for me. She told me that I had a hen setting and asked if I wanted her to take the eggs. Without thinking I told her to just leave her and I'd take care of it when I got home. Well by the time I got home, she was sitting on about 25 eggs! From what I can tell she was either stealing eggs from the other nests or some of the other hens were laying in her nest box. So I set up my broody coop for her ( I use an old rabbit hutch) and candled the eggs the best I could ( I'm not very good at it yet) and threw out the un-fertile eggs, leaving a dozen. Fast forward to about 5 days ago: two bitties and things were looking good. She was still sitting. The next day, she was off the nest teaching her little ones how to eat and drink and I found a dead chick that had completely hatched and seemed healthy. I thought it was just one of those cases where the little fella just died. Then that afternoon another chick hatched and was just fine. Next morning I found a egg that she had stepped on and broke. The little fella was too early to make it. Today, she didn't sit on the eggs much at all so I called a friend and borrowed an incubator to try and hatch the rest of the eggs. I candled them and they seems to be at very different stages, I guess because not all the eggs were hers and were laid different days. The good news is I could see very distinct movement in the eggs and everything appeared normal.
I'm pretty stressed and want to do all I can for them to hatch right but I'm curious how this is going to hatch with the eggs being at different stages?
I'm pretty stressed and want to do all I can for them to hatch right but I'm curious how this is going to hatch with the eggs being at different stages?
