incubation advice

[Farmer In Training]

Hello! Just joined and I am so thrilled!!! Anyways, I have 18 chickens, (three being roosters) And we have one batch of 8 that is around 7 or 8 months and then we have a 5 month batch of ten. I have a incubator coming and have researched like crazy about it and so I now know all the details ( it's a magic fly mini ) and I would love some advice on the following questions:

1. My batch who is around 6 months is starting to lay, how do I know when they're eggs are ready to go in the incubator? ( They are Easter ethers and the eggs are currently small since they have only been laying for about a week. )

2. Any advice with the incubator you might have? (It has auto turner and temp control. )

Thank you so much, I'm so excited!!!!!

 

[PD-Riverman]

I could not sell the small eggs so I hatched them from the beginning----100's and 100's of them and most were fertile and hatched good!

I have no knowledge with your incubator---maybe some one that has one can help. Most all of my main ones hold about 300 eggs each.

 

[Poppylu]

Hi, We're pretty new here too! It's fun to connect with other chicken fans. We had our first hatch a couple of months ago and just embarking on our second (the eggs went in this morning). This site is amazing and very supportive! We've hardly had to ask a question as searches have come up with all our newbie questions already answered!

We have two magic fly minis (two different models). The one that does not have an auto turner seems to be very even keeled and quiet and is very easy to control both temp and humidity. (It's a round yellow based model.) The other does have the auto turning feature and is much noisier and temps tend to fluctuate wildly. Both this time and last we had trouble keeping the temp on track. We found moving the incubator to a cooler area helped a fair bit, it is almost like the fan works harder to cool the spiking temp and in doing so heats up the bator.
Another useful move was to put a thick wool blanket under the incubators. This acts as insulation and keeps the temps from fluctuating so much.

For our first hatch we divided the eggs equally between both bators and both had same hatch rate. The auto turning one just took a up a lot more attention! Hope this helps!

 

[Farmer In Training]

Hi, We're pretty new here too! It's fun to connect with other chicken fans. We had our first hatch a couple of months ago and just embarking on our second (the eggs went in this morning). This site is amazing and very supportive! We've hardly had to ask a question as searches have come up with all our newbie questions already answered!

We have two magic fly minis (two different models). The one that does not have an auto turner seems to be very even keeled and quiet and is very easy to control both temp and humidity. (It's a round yellow based model.) The other does have the auto turning feature and is much noisier and temps tend to fluctuate wildly. Both this time and last we had trouble keeping the temp on track. We found moving the incubator to a cooler area helped a fair bit, it is almost like the fan works harder to cool the spiking temp and in doing so heats up the bator.
Another useful move was to put a thick wool blanket under the incubators. This acts as insulation and keeps the temps from fluctuating so much.

For our first hatch we divided the eggs equally between both bators and both had same hatch rate. The auto turning one just took a up a lot more attention! Hope this helps!

Thank you! We have the auto turning one so this helped a lot

 

[Farmer In Training]

I could not sell the small eggs so I hatched them from the beginning----100's and 100's of them and most were fertile and hatched good!

I have no knowledge with your incubator---maybe some one that has one can help. Most all of my main ones hold about 300 eggs each.

Thank you so much! Where your chickens just laying the small eggs or have they been laying for a long time?

 

[PD-Riverman]

Thank you so much! Where your chickens just laying the small eggs or have they been laying for a long time?

Just started pullet eggs that had not gotten big enough for my customers----we weighed each egg----no in a few weeks the pullet eggs would get up to sellable size----so I could take a dozen pullet eggs, hatch them and sell them for $12 to $36 a dozen(according to the demand/time of year) for standard chickens.
Sure I had Bantam breeds with small eggs too, but you were talking about pullet eggs I was thinking----just started laying pullets.

 

[Farmer In Training]

Just started pullet eggs that had not gotten big enough for my customers----we weighed each egg----no in a few weeks the pullet eggs would get up to sellable size----so I could take a dozen pullet eggs, hatch them and sell them for $12 to $36 a dozen(according to the demand/time of year) for standard chickens.
Sure I had Bantam breeds with small eggs too, but you were talking about pullet eggs I was thinking----just started laying pullets.

Thanks that is EXACTLY what I needed to hear!

 

[Poppylu]

Thank you! We have the auto turning one so this helped a lot

So happy to help. It is quite a journey and so much to learn (for us anyways!) Good luck and look forward to hearing how your hatch goes.

 

[Farmer In Training]

So happy to help. It is quite a journey and so much to learn (for us anyways!) Good luck and look forward to hearing how your hatch goes.

Oh yes I will defiantly keep you updated!!!

 

[ChickFlick123]

Hi! I was so excited to see you have the same incubator as I do. I am a newbie as well and trying our first hatch but really feel like I have no clue what I am doing despite all the reading I have done. I have the same auto turning Magic Fly as you do but I can't seem to regulate the humidity well. My temp stays consistent but the humidity goes anywhere from 40-80% and of course there isn't room in the incubator for a humidity gauge to actually sit in there with the eggs when it's an auto-turner so that complicates it even more. What are you doing to manage your humidity? Any ideas on how to keep it monitored better or regulated better?