Broody Hens

We have 8 nesting boxes in our hen house.  Nine if you count the milkcrate with hay in it on the floor.  It's an overflow nesting box, and it's a good thing we have it.  Right now we have 5 hens that are broody.  Here are four of them right here:

Broody hens have gotten the motherly instincts.  They want to sit on their eggs and incubate them.  The incubation period is 21 days.  Broody hens, during this time, may stop laying eggs.  The trouble is, we have 40-something laying hens right now, with another 13 in a chicken tractor that we hatched out in our incubator from our fertilized eggs.  We don't need additional chicks at this time, so I reach under these hens each afternoon and snatch the eggs from beneath them.  They are very protective of their clutch of eggs during this stage, and they always fluff their bodies up and peck my fingers as I reach underneath them.  They don't like this at all!

They sit on their nests all day long in the sweltering heat.  I've moved water tubs into the hen house so that they can have water when they need it.  Most things I've read say that a hen will "break" her broodiness after 21 days, but we don't always see this happen.  Their biological clock is ticking and they desire to hatch out some babies.  Some of the broody hens sit on NO eggs.  Others are sitting on a chalk egg that we have in the box to deal with rat snake problems.  They don't know what they are sitting on.  They just want to sit.

This would be a perfect time to just put 8 or so eggs underneath each one, but we don't need anymore baby chicks for our flock.  We are gathering, on average, about 22 eggs each day.  We eat all we can, keep our kids and family members stocked with fresh eggs and sell the rest.  One of the things we've been eating for lunch is egg salad sandwiches.  I'm not a big fan of mayonnaise, but my wife makes homemade mayonnaise that is good, so she'll boil some eggs, cut them up, add olive salad mix and salt and pepper and serve over some toasted sourdough bread for an open-faced sandwich.  We enjoy that for lunch.

Hopefully, at some point soon, the broody hens will be broken and will once again be out on the pasture foraging in the grass for bugs and worms.