Creating "True-Breeding" (Homozygous For Blue Shell Base) Olive Eggers

[IoneDexamene]

The only chicken that breeds true for a remotely dark green egg is the Swedish Isbar, an expensive and hard-to-find variety which often lays disappointingly pale eggs. To remedy this, I've come up with a strategy to quickly create olive eggers that are homozygous for the blue shell base gene, but without the huge quantities of test crosses usually suggested for this sort of breeding program. I'll give the TL;DR here first, but I can give more information on how and why this cross works if anyone is interested.

In short: take the darkest-laying pea-combed olive egger hen you can find (must lay a green egg, not brown!) and cross her to a cream legbar rooster. The vast majority (around 94%) of the offspring with pea combs will be homozygous-for-blue-shell-base olive eggers, and their eggs will be about half as dark as their mother's. You can use these birds to start a flock of relatively true-breeding olive layers. The recessive white shell base will still be lurking in your flock, to some extent, but not in any great quantity; as long as you remove the rare brown layers that pop up from your breeding program, the trait will continue to fade from your population. At this point, you can also start selecting for darker eggs if you want, the same way you might with a marans flock.

If anyone has any questions about this, wants/plans to do this cross, or has ever done (or even heard of!) projects similar to this one, please let me know! If there's interest, I may also have hatching eggs available in the future.

 

[MysteryChicken]

I'll be making a new breed called The Emerald Dragon. It's gonna be a Giant, Meaty, Showy, Great producer of green eggs. It's gonna have a Gamefowl body build, black shiny, long flowy feathers, black skin, & walnut comb.

Trying to figure which one of my EE/Brahma crosses is laying these.

 

[IoneDexamene]

Wow, what a beautiful shade of olive! That's a great amount of brown pigment/blotch for an EE/brahma cross! I haven't heard any other reports like this, but anecdotally, I once had a case where an easter egger who was just starting to lay laid a blue egg, then a white egg, then blue for the rest of her life. I speculated that the biological mechanism that makes the eggshell blue wasn't fully "in gear" yet at first. Looking at your thread, it seems possible that your case is like this, but that's just a guess. Either way, best of luck identifying who's laying olive, and congratulations on your pretty eggs!

Your breeding project sounds amazing! Fibro olive eggers sound pretty much like my idea of a perfect chicken, haha. I'm off to subscribe to your thread!

 

[MysteryChicken]

Wow, what a beautiful shade of olive! That's a great amount of brown pigment/blotch for an EE/brahma cross! I haven't heard any other reports like this, but anecdotally, I once had a case where an easter egger who was just starting to lay laid a blue egg, then a white egg, then blue for the rest of her life. I speculated that the biological mechanism that makes the eggshell blue wasn't fully "in gear" yet at first. Looking at your thread, it seems possible that your case is like this, but that's just a guess. Either way, best of luck identifying who's laying olive, and congratulations on your pretty eggs!

Your breeding project sounds amazing! Fibro olive eggers sound pretty much like my idea of a perfect chicken, haha. I'm off to subscribe to your thread!

It could be possible my girl is having a pigmentation issue.

Thanks, I love the color she produces. I hope it's 100% the lady I leg banded.

I hope you like my thread.

 

[Jennamomof4]

The only chicken that breeds true for a remotely dark green egg is the Swedish Isbar, an expensive and hard-to-find variety which often lays disappointingly pale eggs. To remedy this, I've come up with a strategy to quickly create olive eggers that are homozygous for the blue shell base gene, but without the huge quantities of test crosses usually suggested for this sort of breeding program. I'll give the TL;DR here first, but I can give more information on how and why this cross works if anyone is interested.

In short: take the darkest-laying pea-combed olive egger hen you can find (must lay a green egg, not brown!) and cross her to a cream legbar rooster. The vast majority (around 94%) of the offspring with pea combs will be homozygous-for-blue-shell-base olive eggers, and their eggs will be about half as dark as their mother's. You can use these birds to start a flock of relatively true-breeding olive layers. The recessive white shell base will still be lurking in your flock, to some extent, but not in any great quantity; as long as you remove the rare brown layers that pop up from your breeding program, the trait will continue to fade from your population. At this point, you can also start selecting for darker eggs if you want, the same way you might with a marans flock.

If anyone has any questions about this, wants/plans to do this cross, or has ever done (or even heard of!) projects similar to this one, please let me know! If there's interest, I may also have hatching eggs available in the future.

Do you have any hatching eggs now or olive egger for sale and where are you located?

 

[KHoward]

The only chicken that breeds true for a remotely dark green egg is the Swedish Isbar, an expensive and hard-to-find variety which often lays disappointingly pale eggs. To remedy this, I've come up with a strategy to quickly create olive eggers that are homozygous for the blue shell base gene, but without the huge quantities of test crosses usually suggested for this sort of breeding program. I'll give the TL;DR here first, but I can give more information on how and why this cross works if anyone is interested.

In short: take the darkest-laying pea-combed olive egger hen you can find (must lay a green egg, not brown!) and cross her to a cream legbar rooster. The vast majority (around 94%) of the offspring with pea combs will be homozygous-for-blue-shell-base olive eggers, and their eggs will be about half as dark as their mother's. You can use these birds to start a flock of relatively true-breeding olive layers. The recessive white shell base will still be lurking in your flock, to some extent, but not in any great quantity; as long as you remove the rare brown layers that pop up from your breeding program, the trait will continue to fade from your population. At this point, you can also start selecting for darker eggs if you want, the same way you might with a marans flock.

If anyone has any questions about this, wants/plans to do this cross, or has ever done (or even heard of!) projects similar to this one, please let me know! If there's interest, I may also have hatching eggs available in the future.

Can any blue gened rooster be used?

 

[IoneDexamene]

Can any blue gened rooster be used?

It's important that the rooster be 1. homozygous for the blue shell base gene and 2. single-combed in order to be reasonably sure that the pea-combed offspring are homozygous. The blue egg gene is very close to the comb shape gene on the chromosome, so when the pea comb from the olive egger mother is passed on, it's very likely that her blue egg gene was also passed. If the father also has a pea comb, it's impossible to know if the pea comb came from the father or the mother, so you can't identify the homozygotes among their offspring. Additionally, if the father only has one copy of the blue egg gene, there's no way to tell if he passed it on or not. That's why a standard olive egger rooster won't work for this technique, although you could do the reverse cross and use a cream legbar hen with a pea-combed olive egger rooster.

I've been working on this breeding project for the past few years, and it has gone pretty much exactly as expected. I call the resulting birds "easter olives." Selling hatching eggs is not worth the hassle for me at this time, but I would consider swapping eggs with other people who are working on similar projects. Diversifying genetics in this type of project is always good.