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I’ve been idly wondering if I couldn’t combine my egg incubation project with a camera that I use for testing oacapture to record chicks as they hatch. I have some lenses that might be suitable and some cameras that can be set up for automatic exposure. The main question is whether they can be made to work through the plastic cover of the incubator. I’ll see if I can try that out over the next couple of weeks.

A day in, the relative humidity in my Suro 20 incubator is being reported as about 60% and it really ought to be a bit lower than that — nearer 52%.

If I’ve done my research properly I reckon on average the eggs should lose between 0.58% and 0.68% of their weight each day if the humidity is correct. That being the case, each tray should have lost somewhere in the region of 15g in weight by the time they’ve been in the incubator two days, or about 22g after three days. I’ll weigh them either tomorrow evening or the following evening (they went into the incubators at 5pm, so that should represent two or three days) and see how they’re doing.

I have to admit that I’m a little short of ideas on what to do if they aren’t losing weight fast enough. I might try putting a handful of rice in the bottom of the incubator to see if that helps.

My eggs arrived safely so this Saturday I unpacked them to go into the incubators. I have one dozen each of Cream Legbar:

White Leghorn:

and Copper Black Marans:

This is too many to fit into a single one of my incubators so I split them equally between two, mixing the positions of the eggs in the rows. The first eighteen went into my Suro 20 which has a very convenient automatic humidity controller that pumps water into the incubator as required. The target temperature and humidity are also set digitally on the control panel and it has an automatic turning cradle which makes it very easy to use. Here are the eggs in the tray:

And with the incubator up to temperature:

The second set went in my Brinsea Octagon 20. This also has a turning cradle, but there’s no humidity control and the temperature is set using a small twiddly screw on the side. More eggs:

And coming back to temperature after I put in the eggs:

Before they went into the incubator I weighed the eggs and the total weight of the tray once the eggs were added. For the first incubator the total weight of the eggs was 1146g and the tray was an additional 408g. The second set of eggs were 1163g and the tray 246g. I’ll use this to check how the eggs are doing in terms of weight loss during incubation.

Today I’ve ordered some eggs to put in the incubator. We didn’t raise any chicks last year and we’re down to only a few hens now, so it’s about that time again. In fact if I left it any later I don’t think it would work out in terms of fitting around other things we have going on.

We like different colours of eggs, so I’ve ordered a dozen each of White Leghorn (that lay white eggs), Cream Legbar (blue eggs) and Copper Black Maran (dark brown eggs). Assuming we get a few cockerels then I might let the Marans and Cream Legbars cross-breed as in the past we’ve done this and had second generation hens that lay green eggs.

Best get the incubator out and make sure it’s all working 🙂

I’d really like to try raising some ducks from eggs too, but I need to organise a suitable environment for keeping them first.