could you give us the supplier that you got your fertile eggs from. Would apprecreate it a great deal.

thanks. btw, too cute. I have 32 hens and so many go broody and I can sit for hours and watch Mama hen care for her babes.

Velvet, thank you so much for setting up all this to share with us! You are someone special, for sure.

Hoo hoo! Such fun to check in on!

--Johanna

Sorry I haven't checked back in, things have been hyper busy. We ended up with 12 chicks: 2 Porcelain Belgian d'Uccles, 1 Black Mottled Belgian d'Uccle, 1 Black Silkie, 1 Cuckoo Silkie, 1 Blue Giant Cochin, 2 Lemon Blue Giant Cochins, 2 Golden Laced Giant Cochins and 2 Salmon Faverolles.

As for my suppliers, I got all of my eggs of ebay this year. The breeders are extremely nice, down-to-earth folks who replied with friendly emails, bent over backwards to please and in most cases put in an extra egg or two. They also wrapped the eggs extremely well and marked the boxes as to the contents.

I did continue to have a low hatch rate this year, even for shipped eggs. I incubated 25 eggs in each incubator, and had 5 hatch in one incubator, 7 in the other. At least hatching eggs by mail this time tells me that it isn't my flock that's to blame.

I opened the unhatched eggs, and found eggs at all stages of development, literally from just-started to full-term chicks. They seemed to be spread out equally, too--I didn't see a higher percentage of chicks at certain stages. And both incubators reflected the same results.

So I really don't know WHAT is going on with the incubators. One is 10+ years old, the other 2 years old and are identical. I am following instructions religiously, temp and humidity are maintained correctly.

From now one I'm not going to incubate more than a dozen or so eggs at a time and see how that goes. The incubator thing is making me crazy.

Anyone else who hatches eggs in an incubator--how many eggs do you set at once? Have you ever loaded your incubator to it's maximum number?

Velvet ~:>