As you may have seen in the earlier post today, we have had seven chicks hatched by a broody hen without the use of artificial heating or humidity, and with definitely no input from electronics or from me. Nature is indeed a wondrous thing.
However, back at the incubator, where science meets eggs, it was time to weigh the eggs.
The theory is that an egg should lose 13% of its weight during incubation due to evaporation. According to the manual that comes with the incubator this occurs in a straight line, though I’m dubious about that. Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum. In my experience it doesn’t care for straight lines either. We will see.
According to the weighing I did today the eggs have lost around 3% of their weight. The Polish eggs have lost 3.3%, the green eggs have lost 2.9% and the two brown eggs I shoved in to fill the space have lost 3.8%. They are larger than the rest and come from older birds so it may be that the shells are more porous. Taking the totals for the three lots of eggs it comes out at 3.33%.
According to my calculation 13% overall loss works out as 0.6% per day. The eggs have now been in the incubator for 5 days so 5 x 0.6% is 3%.
Looks like we’re about right.
Bearing in mind that I’m weighing small numbers of eggs on a kitchen scale I’m happy with this level of accuracy.
Looks like things may be going right!
Congrats
There are sixteen more days yet – plenty of time for disaster to strike!
what an interesting info re; weight loss of eggs in the incubator. thanks for surprising me and wanting to read more about it 🙂
I used to work in a hatchery and it surprised me too – we never did anything like this. 😉