Our son received an egg incubator for a Christmas gift. We waited until after the new year to put this machine to work on our farm.
We have a couple of roosters and multiple hens so we can assume that the eggs produced by our hens will be fertile. We gathered the eggs as we normally do and placed them into the incubator. The directions for the machine were simple and straightforward.
As you can see, we did not wash the eggs. We simply removed them from the nesting boxes and placed them directly into the incubator.
The eggs are divided by a circular plastic piece that is connected in the center to a motor. This provides the occasional rotation needed to mimic nature.
The reservoir on the outside is where we pour the water. The water is used to maintain the correct humidity level in the incubator.
We set the temperature and adjusted the dial for the humidity level to provide the most ideal situation possible.
Then, we waited.
We candled the eggs at day 7 and day 14. Honestly, we couldn't see much at the day 7 mark and may skip that candling in the future. During the later candling, we were able to see movement in some of the eggs. The darker, or thicker shelled, eggs were very difficult for our untrained eyes to notice any variations or movement. Due to being new to this process, we only removed one egg during the candling process. We left the rest of them to see the results.
Roughly twenty-two days later, we started hearing chirping and noticed a few holes in the eggshells.
It was an exciting time as we could see the eggs moving about in the incubator as the chicks were finding their way into the world.
At the end of the first day, we had six baby chicks.
The cat even found this event worth waking up to investigate!
We left the chicks in the incubator overnight to help encourage the other, unhatched babies to break free. We woke up to fourteen baby chicks!
We moved the chicks into a tote with a heat lamp and water.
We had one remaining straggler that joined the group.
There was one chick that seemed to take an extremely long time to hatch. We continued to maintain the hands-off approach to the situation. We were cautioned not to open the incubator very often during this time as it could cause issues with the remaining eggs trying to hatch. It turns out that this baby really did need help and didn't make it. It was disheartening to discover our mistake.
At the end of the experiment, we ended up with fifteen new baby chicks that hatched from the original twenty-two eggs. That is a hatch rate of 68%. We will consider that a success for our first attempt!
If you are interested in the incubator that we used, here is the link: https://amzn.to/3SKm0k7
As an Amazon affiliate member, we will receive a small commission if you choose to use this link to purchase the item.