Well, it is 9 days since I put 18 eggs into our incubator, we have candled the eggs and have 8 little wrigglers!
So from 18 eggs that have been through the Royal Mail system I am very happy, so are the children.
We did have a slight problem, I had put the eggs in the incubator on their sides and could only just get them in, but the incubator was advertised as a 24 egg incubator, so I turned to the source of all knowledge – Youtube!!
It turns out I had put them in wrong, this actual incubator stores the eggs upright, with the pointy end down, and with the design of the incubator, you can just turn it on its side, which will turn the eggs for you, instead of me having to turn them by hand every four hours!! It isn’t a problem the way I have put them in, but it is quite time consuming turning them all…
I contacted the lady we had got the eggs from to tell her we had some fertilised eggs and she offered me a fantastic deal on some more eggs, so we made the decision to transfer the 8 eggs to a smaller incubator, that does store them on their sides and put the other eggs into the large 24 egg incubator.
So, this Wednesday evening, exactly one week after the other eggs were put in, we have set 24 Orpington eggs in the incubator-pointy end down and I now just rock the entire incubator one way or the other every four hours.
I will report back in a week, how many of the 24 eggs we have fertilised.
If, obviously I am now a super egg hatcher we could end up with a total of 32 chicks, its a good job the children are on school holidays to help me take care of our new babies, especially as the two hatches will be a week apart, we will need to supervise them and ensure the bigger ones don’t intimidate the little ones, I envisage a school playground scene!
The eggs that we have chosen are all Orpingtons, but a mix of different coloured ones, all running together, so I cannot wait to see what amazing colours we achieve.