Don't Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch

The wife and I have been talking.  Egg prices (and other grocery items) keep rising.  We've seen an increase in customer's purchases of our eggs and realized the reason - prices for store-bought eggs have skyrocketed.  We never buy eggs at the store so we were oblivious to egg prices!  Wow.  

As we looked out in the pasture and saw one of the rooster doing... rooster things, we decided it was time to collect some eggs since they should be fertilized, and put them in our incubator and hatch out some chicks.  We hadn't incubated any in several years.  The chickens haven't yet hit that BOOM in egg production we usually see in mid to late February, but we decided to save eggs until we could fill the incubator.

The first day we collected a dozen.  The next day nine.  The next day ten.  Finally, today we picked up a dozen.  With that we had slightly more than enough to fill the 42 slots in our incubator.  It is okay to keep eggs up to 5-7 days at a temperature of > 55 degrees to hold for incubating.  We didn't wash the eggs prior to placing them in the egg turning trays.

I got out the old Hovabator incubator down from the top shelf of the utility room.  It was full of dust, so I wiped it down.  Then I read the instructions to re-familiarize myself with the process.  I plugged in the egg turning tray to ensure it still worked.  Check.  Then I checked out the thermometers for accurate readings.  Check.  Then I plugged in the heating element and fan.  Check.  I poured some warm water into the recessed portion of the bottom of the incubator for humidity.  We labeled the top showing that at 8:20 pm on Feb 6th we put 42 eggs in the incubator.  

These chickens, if they hatch, will be a diverse brood.  We have Rhode Island Reds, Barred Rocks, Aracauna, Black Star, and Golden Comet hens.  Our roosters are Rhode Island Reds and another unknown breed.  I placed the thermometers (one mercury and one digital) atop the egg turning trays and plugged the incubator in and checked every ten minutes to watch the temperature rise.  At 9:08 pm it was 79.8 degrees.  At 9:30 pm it was 84.5 degrees.  Movin' on up...

We want it to get to 100.5 and stay there.  Chicken eggs hatch in 21 days.

We'll continue watching tonight until the temperature reaches 100.5 and stabilizes.  The incubator hasn't been used in quite a while and we want to ensure the temperature holds where it's supposed to.  We want to incubate eggs - not cook 'em!  This will be a fun project to watch.  We'll keep you posted.