Mistakes I Made Hatching Chicken Eggs at Home

So I’ve decided to try hatching chicken eggs at home before my order of chicks arrives. I wanted to try and grow my own Olive Egger and also to have a few more chicks together. My goal with these chickens is to have colorful egg baskets. See Here about my previous experience hatching.

So I began incubating eggs inside. Then Cherry decided to go broody within a week of my hatching some eggs. Ha! Who’d of thought, so I let her sit on the eggs as well. Figures to let them go as naturally as possible. I can learn from hatching indoors. If she makes it the whole way to hatching those eggs that will be awesome. If not I can put them in the incubator inside as a backup.

Lessons I’ve already learned

Pretty quickly at around the 2-week mark, I checked the eggs. and I came across some problems. For one, my incubator was keeping the eggs TOO hot. I couldn’t be sure until I candled them. Here is what I found.

Blood rings are a sure sign that something is wrong. This may have been a mistake that I made with the original hatching eggs I tried. 100-102 degrees Ferenheight is what eggs should be kept at, over that and the embryos can be overheated and stop developing. So I think I kept this too hot not thinking the incubator would keep them warm enough. The incubator said 101, The thermometer I put in there had said 102, so I knew it was warm but I think it kept the eggs too hot. I wasn’t expecting that many to have blood rings. The second problem I experienced was fertility.

Interestingly enough, even though I have a rooster in my flock with 5 hens, only some of the eggs were fertilized. With that ratio, I was totally under the impression he was getting jiggy with ALL the hens. Apparently, he was NOT. I expected all of the eggs I gathered to be fertile. But they either weren’t fertile or stopped developing almost immediately. But I figured out that none of my orpington (Cinnamon) eggs were fertile. And just a couple of others weren’t fertile or developing. I did realize I had the temperature up too high and that could have killed some of the embryos. Out of the remaining eggs in the incubator hatched. So 4/12 with the heat too high isn’t the greatest but I definitely learned from that mistake. I will have to make some adjustments the next time I decide to try this.

Cherry-Broody Momma

Cherry is such a sweet soul, she definitely is not aggressive enough and something must have got one of the eggs under her and also made its way through her food. I found a broken eggshell with development in her enclosure today. I decided to move her into the Chicken Run but keep her aside in the enclosure so she can still have her own space. And out of the 8 eggs she had 1 was eaten by something. And 2 were not fertile or not showing any development. 4 have hatched. And 1 looked mostly developed but did not hatch. She did poop near the eggs and I tried to remove the poop. But some still got on that egg. I’m not sure if it didn’t hatch due to bacteria or if she gave up on the egg and wasn’t sitting on it anymore.

For her set up I used the old dog crate that we used while training Turnip, and some scrap wood and blocks to give her a safe space (away from the other hens). For some reason, 4 nesting boxes are just not enough with them, they had to all use the SAME one she was broody in. Because of that, I marked all of her eggs with Sharpy so I could tell any new eggs from the ones she was sitting on. Keeping her separate made egg collection much easier. And reduced the risk of the other chickens crushing her eggs trying to use the same box.

Now Chick Pics.

Surprisingly, I got some interesting chicks out of these. The ones that were hatched from chip my Americauna turned out blue in color.

All of the other chicks hatched out black or.. mostly black. But I still got some beards and muffs. The puffy cheeks are adorable! In total, I had 8 chicks hatch, which was way too many, so I did rehome some of the extras. between the broody mama and the incubator doing work. I kept some to see how they grow up.

Ending Lessons

Monitor your temperature. Make sure to set your incubator up a day in advance, and check that the temperature is consistent. I learned a lot here about maintaining the temperature.

Humidity is important. Keep the humidity existent. It should be in the 20s to 50% range, but unless they are hatching it doesn’t need to be crazy muggy in there. There are also different methods of hatching with humidity levels.

Separate a broody hen. You don’t want your chickens all crowding in the nesting boxes. I think this was the best call here, if you are able if the chickens in your flock are crowding they can break an egg or two fighting over the space, even if others are available.

Check your eggs weekly. I think it’s important to make sure to stay on top of the developmental stages of the eggs. If I had paid closer attention I would have caught the eggs that weren’t fertile earlier and would remove them to have avoided the risk of spoiled eggs exploding. Luckily this did not happen to me but I do know it CAN happen.

Thank you for joining me here, Continue along with me on my blog by signing up for the email list. I can’t wait to see how it is to let these chicks grow up. I’ll be crossing my fingers for girls to see what they lay. The Grey chicks should lay blue, the black chick should lay olive if it isn’t a roo. THERE has to be ONE girl out of the three that I kept, but knowing my luck we will see. Might be a whole new learning experience. But if there is at least 1 roo I do have a home lined up for them.

Feel free to add anything here or ask questions.