Now that we have created pens and have our breeding groups, it is time to get busy hatching. We were having OK success and with the decision to hatch more we invested in a new incubator. I am not where I want to deal with hundreds of chicks on every hatch, so we purchased a Brinsea Advance 54. It arrived in September and we set up our first hatch. Unfortunately, we had some issues, and we have had to deal with some hatching woes.
We loaded 54 eggs in the incubator and eagerly awaited hatch day. For this hatch I downloaded an app called Hatchabatch. It keeps track your hatch and sends reminders of points along the way to candle your eggs. It was using this app that I realized I was was timing my hatches wrong. I would set a bunch of eggs on a Saturday and expect chicks three weeks later on Saturday. I had so many hatching on Friday that I thought the incubators were running warm and hatching early. This app showed they were hatching on time.
Because I thought hatch day was a Saturday, I was locking down on a Thursday. With the app, I started to lock down and increase humidity on Wednesday. And that is when my problems began.
We had two hatches in the Brinsea where we only had a few of the eggs hatch. We had close to 40 fully formed chicks and yet only a few got out of the egg. The others were fully formed and just never pipped. I was heartbroken.
Since it was the end of the year I decided I was done hatching for a bit. Then I got some really neat green speckled eggs and wanted to hatch them out. So I filled the incubator once again and added a sensor I got off EBay called Sensorpush. Sensorpush is a really neat sensor for temperature and humidity that sends data to your cell phone. With that in the Brinsea I noticed the temperature would not hold. It ran fine for about a week and then started to drop. I pushed the temperature up and it made no difference. The fan also started to make some noise and within a few hours it flat out quit.
It was now Christmas Eve and I ran down to Tractor Supply and got one of their incubators and moved eggs. I could not fit them all in the new incubator so I put the remainder in my first incubator and worried through the rest of the incubation period. My Hatchabatch app told me to increase humidity and lock-down and so I did. And, once again, I only had a few hatch out of close to 40 fully formed chicks at hatch time.
The humidity and temperature held fine through the rest of the incubation period, but I think there was a delay in development with some of the initial inability of the Brinsea to hold the proper temp. I also got to thinking I never had this problem before and got to wondering if I may be increasing the humidity too soon and drowning the chicks in the shell as they are internally pipping.
My research online seemed to show that most chicks are lost in the first and last three days. Since I was getting fully formed chicks it had to be something going on at the end. My research showed they do an internal pip before coming through the shell for outside air. If the humidity is too high, there can be enough moisture inside the air sack to cause chicks to drown. When I considered what I used to do an what I was currently doing, this was the only thing that made sense.
We are getting ready to try another hatch. Brinsea had me ship the top to them and they fixed the fan and the issue with the sensor holding the temperature and shipped it back to me. Got to admit they have some very good customer service. Tonight we have loaded it up and will make a few adjustments and see how we do with the hatch. We will not increase humidity when the app says but the day after. We will also monitor the air sack to make sure we are on track for proper humidity during the incubation period.
And, when you have eggs as pretty as we do, and three incubators.. well.. I guess you just fill up a second one. If we are successful we will have close to 100 chicks available around Valentines Day.
Wish us luck!!
Comments