The Official Forum of the Ameraucana Breeders Club > Housing, Health & Hatching

IDEAL humidity for lockdown

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Jess:


Good evening,
Jes, I incubate my eggs @ 99.5 degrees and as close to 50% RH that I can. On the 19th day I \"lock down\" place them in the hatcher, which is 99.5 degrees and as close to 75% RH as I can keep them. Once you lock down your eggs don\'t open the hatcher for any reason other to add water to the pan, if the RH drops.
My incubators and hatcher is in my basement and the Temp and RH is fairly stable.
My hatch rate now is 90%+.
What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for anybody else. So try and see what works for you. The more you incubate the better your hatch rate will get as you learn more about what works and what don\'t.
Jess

bantamhill:
John is correct that I add little to no humidity to incubators for most of the year. I have a few eggs currently in the incubator and they are right on schedule for air sac development. I lost many, many dozens of eggs until I learned that where I am and our heating system does not require any extra humidity. We have enough here in Central Missouri. I aim for an air sack that is about 25% of the egg at day 18. I never add humidity after day 18. The following picture is helpful. It is at the bottom of the page at this link.

http://bevsmarans.com/hatching_eggs.htm

I also tend to incubate at about 100 degrees. I have found a rapidly developing embryo is a healthy one.

Forced air and lots of circulation also works best for me.

I qualify all of this by saying incubating is as much an art as it is a science and only the hens really know how to do it perfectly every time! :p

Also, as Patty suggested, you have to have a healthy egg before you start. For chickens that do not get to forage much a layer feed will just not produce viable embryos. If it is a feed issue you will see lots of burn-outs between days 14-18. Micro and macro nutrients should be considered for non-foraging birds. Everybody has their favorite, I like Kelp meal, but other things work well.

Beth C:
I found out the hard way about breeder nutrition. My first year I got EEs to \"practice\" with. I had wonderful hatches. The following year I couldn\'t hatch Ameraucanas to save my life. The few that made it past day 18 were weak and more died than lived. I was beside myself - I couldn\'t imagine what I was doing wrong. I couldn\'t think of anything that was different from the first year. Then Michael mentioned embryo burnout and the light bulb came on. The EEs had been loose, but the more valuable breeder birds were penned. I added catfish pellets to up the protein and the difference was night & day! I think I\'ll look into the kelp meal, too.

As for humidity, I gave up and threw out my hydrometer. I monitor the air sac and I\'ve found I rarely need to add water before day 18. But I have had a problem with chicks drying out during the hatch, no matter how high the humidity, so I\'ve gone to using a still-air incubator as a hatcher and they seem to do better without the air blowing down on them.

Sharon Yorks:
As an experiment, I brought 7 eggs home from Indianapolis to see if I could get them to hatch. They traveled over 12 hours to get there. They stayed in the vehicle for several days with weather dropping pretty low. They warmed back up on the 5 hour trip home. I set them the next day (Oct 31st) and hoped for the best. I like to keep the humidity around 45-50 for the first 18 days, (65-70 for the last 3 days) but twice I noticed the humidity had dropped to around 25-30 (my fault). On the morning of the 22nd day, a strong little blue Ameraucana had hatched from an egg that was dated 10-10. After a few more days, I broke the others open and found only yolks. Little “Indi” is now a week old and is thriving in my office with her/his pet moose and can hold her/his own with the family dog.  

Sharon Yorks:
Indi and Sophie.

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