One More Trick To Try to Get the Hens Laying Again

Yesterday we talked about our hens suddenly stopping laying eggs.  I think it is largely a nutritional deficit, but part of the egg deficit is no doubt due to short days with gloomy, overcast weather.  A chicken needs 14 hours of daylight in order to lay eggs.  Okay, we're going to do something that goes against everything we've always said to help 'jump start' the hens into laying eggs for us.

We're putting a light in the hen house.  GASP!  We have always felt that artificial lighting is what the big egg producers do with their 'warehouse hens' to keep the eggs going 24/7 365.  We want to be more natural with our birds, allowing them a rest.  In doing so, it has given our chickens a long life.  Chickens have a finite amount of eggs that they will lay inside them when they hatch.  If you keep them in an artificial lighted facility, their productive life will be over in a short period of time. 

So that made me wonder, how many eggs can a chicken lay?  I found THIS ARTICLE that said the hen's laying lifetime depends on many things: breed, feed, environment, etc.  The Department of Agriculture puts the figure for American birds at 276 eggs per year.  Due to the rest I spoke about in the first two paragraphs, a backyard chicken in England lived a very long life and squeezed out her last eggs at the remarkable age of 17!  Wow.  As far as a prolific layer, a chicken named Cornell Endurance died when she was 12, having laid 1,232 eggs.

Our hens are old.  I really don't know how old since I don't mark them to track their ages.  We replace about 20 each year with new birds for the ones that die or get eaten by predators.  It would be interesting to know how old our oldest chicken is.  We've had them for about 16 years now. 

Here is the light that we put in the hen house to hopefully encourage them to lay:

As soon as the days get longer and they begin to lay, we'll turn it off.  It is merely a heat lamp that we've replaced the heat bulb with a regular 75 watt incandescent bulb.

We're eagerly awaiting them to start laying.  Our inventory of eggs is down to about 60 eggs now.  C'mon hens!  We'll call your hen house Motel 6 and "we'll leave the light on for ya!"