Skip to main content

Egg Hatching 101: Day 3


We are on Day 3 of our Egg Hatching 101 series, which means Day 3 of development for chicken eggs. As I have mentioned before, we use a Brinsea Octagon Advance incubator, which has a great digital display showing the temperature and humidity levels (shown above). You can manually alter the levels if needed, but it comes preset for chicken egg hatching and I've rarely had to mess with it.

One handy thing about this display is that in the lower right corner of the digital area (where there is just a blank space), a "P" will flash if the power has gone out at some point. We talked yesterday about things you can do during a power outage to keep your eggs warm, but what if you aren't at home when it happens and you have no idea? The flashing "P" on the screen gives you a heads up that something interrupted the power, and though you can't do anything much about it, you will know to candle your eggs carefully in the following days to make sure that the embryos inside show continued growth.

And, as a side note in this, if the power DOES go out, as soon as the power is back on this particular incubator goes right back to cookin'. It will work to get the preset temperature and humidity back as quickly as possible.

So on to Day 3... what is happening in the eggs:

  • Head begins to turn

  • Tongue, tail, wing buds and leg buds begin to form


If we were to crack open one of the developing eggs today, this is what it would look like inside:


Egg Yolk Photo



The red blob area in the center of the yolk surface is the developing chick. Remember yesterday when I mentioned that you can try candling for the first time on day 3? This, above, is the veining you will be looking for. It is still early, and some people don't candle until Day 5, but sometimes you can detect veining earlier (especially if you are working with white or very light colored eggs).


Annotated close up image


This is a pretty cool photo of a chick embryo on Day 3. Although it still looks like a tadpole, you can start picking out a few recognizable parts. (Photo credits: University of Illinois)










This post is part of a series about hatching eggs on The Farm at Beaman’s Fork blog.
Want to help support the farm? Please visit our online store or visit us
at the New Bern Farmer’s Market!






 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Barn Improvements

I've been putting off a much needed barn improvement project for a while in hopes of catching the necessary materials on sale. Specifically, high grade rubber mats for the stalls and aisle way. The heavy stall mats I needed finally went on sale today so Seife & I headed into town. We will need to remove the old mats in the stalls and do some leveling of the clay floor before we put the new ones in place, as well as have some sand brought in to raise the floor level in the aisle way because we occasionally have flooding problems when it rains a lot. Project benefits: Reduce bedding costs (which are at an all time high) because rubber mats keep the bedding from being ground into the dirt/clay floor. Reduce flooding problems by allowing us to raise the floor level and then protect it with the mats Reduce dust issues... our barn is very, very old and the aisle way is made up of very, very old fine dusty dirt that gets on everything. This will also help keep our milking stat...

Egg Hatching 101: Day 14 Bones and Shifting

Day 14 means only one week to go!  Time to start getting your brooder planned out and ready if you haven't already done so. Chicks will be hatching before you know it! One Day 14: Bones in the chick are starting to ossify (harden), including the skull. The chick is beginning to shift around in the egg to face the wider end → See our entire  Egg Hatching 101 Series  up to this point here. ← This post is part of a series about hatching eggs on The Farm at Beaman’s Fork blog . Want to help support the farm? Please visit our online store or visit us at the New Bern Farmer’s Market!

Heated Buckets

We recently installed heated water buckets in the barn, one in each stall for the horses and one for the goats. I probably should have done this years ago but I think I've finally had enough of busting ice in the morning only to have it refreeze a couple hours later. The buckets have cords, so you have to put some thought into where you are going to hang them. The cords are wrapped in a protective metal spring to deter chewing, but especially with goats, the cords need to be completely out of sight of them. I don't trust their wandering mouths. I placed the goat bucket pretty much on the ground (still attached to the wall by a bracket) so that it is low enough for the chickens to access it also if needed. They frequently come in the goat stall for water, especially if all of their drip waterers are frozen. The cord goes through the slats in the wall so they can't reach it. I also put a bungee cord around the bucket to keep them from moving it at all (and possibly exposing...