White and Black????

[Jean]

I know that you can breed blues and blacks and wheatens and blue wheatens and get a 50/50 offspring of correctly colored chicks.

Can  you also breed white to black and get the same correct color on the chicks?  I thought I read somewhere that somone did that.

Jean

[John]

Can you also breed white to black and get the same correct color on the chicks?

No.  Sometimes blacks and whites are crossed to improve traits on the whites that may be better on the blacks, such as type, combs, leg, egg or lobe color, etc.  It then only takes another generation to get back to \"pure\" whites.

[Mike Gilbert]

Make the white to black cross only if you are trying to improve whites - as John said it takes two generations.   Don\'t expect to improve blacks by crossing in white.   If you do a black/white cross to improve whites, try to find a black male with some silver in the hackle.  That would indicate he is carrying the sex-linked dominant S gene, which would be less prone to cause brassiness in the whites than the small s (gold)gene.   All female chickens are one or the other, as these are carried on the sex-link chromosome.    Males can be pure for either, or have one of each.   A black male with silver in the hackle will be pure for S, if he has a lemon color there  he is split, and if orange or red, he is pure for s.

[bantamhill]

From personal experience I can relate that a white cross to black or blue for the improvement of black and blue will give you many generations of black and blue cockerels with white or gold in their hackles!

Michael

[Guest]

If you cross a black to a white you would get all black chicks. The white ameraucana is white because of the recessive white gene and the silver gene.

There are actually three different genes that are used to make a white chicken. Recessive white ( c )does not need much help to make a chicken white and if the bird also has silver (S) then that makes a nice clean white bird.

The other white gene is the dominate white gene. This gene will allow some black or gold to show on a bird. So the bird also needs other genes to make the chicken pure white. Most dominate white birds also have silver and even barring to make them a clean white.

Black birds are usually extended black (E) or birchen (ER). Extended black is the best gene to use to make a black bird. Birchen needs help to make a black bird because of the gold or silver that is present on the bird. The birchen bird must also have other genes that can cover the gold or silver with black.

When you cross a white bird to a birchen black bird you may not get the correct combination of genes to eliminate the gold or silver in the offspring. When you continue to cross the offspring it is difficult to get the correct combination of genes to eliminate the gold or silver that will be found in their offspring.

Even extended black will have to be purebred in the offspring before you will get a good solid black bird.

Tim

If you want to know more about chicken genetics visit the following site:http://home.earthlink.net/~100chickens/id5.html