Waiting for the miracle we call birth can be such a rewarding experience. This wonderful time is filled with great anticipation, joy and excitement. Thankfully it only takes 3 short weeks to incubate an egg before you get to experience the start of new life.
Incubating and hatching your own chickens can be a very rewarding experience, especially if most of your hatchlings make it through. If you decide to incubate the eggs yourself, it is very important that you educate yourself on the workings of the incubator.
Egg turning is one of the most important parts of incubation. It must be done to ensure the embryo develops properly and does not stick to one side of the egg. Egg turning can either be done by hand or by using a machine.
Which method is better generally comes down to how involved you want to be in the incubation process. To make you understand what egg turning really involves, we will explore the benefits and drawbacks of manual and machine turning.
The incubation of your eggs is coming along nicely. The temperature and humidity are nice and stable, everything has gone according to plan so far. Day 10 has finally arrived and since it is a good idea to do candling every 4-6 days, it is time for your second candling. Today you will be checking on the embryos progress over the last 6 days.
Time has gone by quickly and it is time for you to do your first candling! Candling is kind of like an ultrasound for chicken eggs, just much, much cheaper. Refer to the candling article to know what you are looking for and what you need to do candling properly.
To make the whole process of hatching your own eggs a little less daunting, we will take you through a day by day process so that you know what to expect. If you read our previous articles, you should know that there are a few things you should do before you start incubating your eggs. Just to make sure you remember, we will give you a quick summary of what to do before incubation begins.
Candling is one of the necessary steps when you do incubation yourself. Candling helps you to identify if an embryo is developing as it should, or if the egg is a dud. You can think of candling as an ultrasound for eggs. It is really easy to do and you can save yourself a lot of trouble by identifying and removing a bad egg early on.
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