Solitary chicken - need advice

[MadMitch]

How do you candle brown eggs? Will a really bright torch work or do you just have to wait and see if anythings in there?

[Charlottechicken]

I managed to candle the light shelled eggs I had with a cheap candling torch. The brown shells I did just wait and see. I assumed the really expensive candlers would do it but didn't want to waste money.

 

However, there have been quite a few Omleteers hatching recently and I am sure one with more experience than me will tell us the answer

[Griffin]

With difficulty

 

I bought one of those candlers that looks like a pen. It was fairly useless and I actually saw more with the light on my mobile phone. I didn't have any dark brown eggs but I did have a dark olive green egg and I couldn't see anything in that right until the end, day 18 or so.

 

It is frustrating and worrying not being able to see into all the eggs. I'd read so many tales of rotten eggs exploding and wrecking the other eggs so I was keen to remove anything dead but if you can't tell it just leaves you worrying to death even more! If I wasn't worrying about one thing it was something else during incubation Why oh why am I going to do it again?

[Jules.]

I am using a small maglite.

Although all the eggs I have ( all 22!) are light sussex ones there are some with light shells & some with quite dark shells Obviously from the different hens that laid them

 

Anyhow, candling I have found is hard. It has to be done in total darkness, & so it takes my eyes a while to get used to the dark, as we need to put the lamp on in between eggs as we put the eggs back into the incubator

 

As its my first hatch I don't really know what to look for, apart from referring to internet & book guides, & so even if I think there is nothing going on in a particular egg I have just left the egg with the others, just in case.

I can't smell any rotten egg smell either, & so all seems well so far.

One week to go

[Lewis]

You can try and candle them, really you're just looking for veins to check they they are developing inside.

 

Have you got any of the same colour eggs which you are not incubating, you can try with those to see if you can see any light on the inside of them.

 

I can see inside my Black Rock eggs, but they aren't really dark brown.

[Egluntyne]

You are also looking for an increase in the size of the airspace.

[feemcg]

I have an LED candler from Solway Feeders (managed to burn out 2 standard Brinsea candlers ). I can see inside dark Marans eggs with it, but it's fantastic with paler eggs. At day 3 I can see a red dot with little red 'spiders legs' radiating from it, a few days later the red dot looks more black and I can see a heart beating rapidly in the centre. After that the black blob just gets bigger and bigger, and more red veins are seen radiating up towards the air sac at the blunt end of the egg (if the red veins all collapse into a ring round the edge of the air sac then the embryo has died).

I can see the chicks claws kicking, and sometimes an eye blinking at me through the shell........amazing