Chicken Eggs and incubation

1st egg from our Sicilian Buttercup Hen

 
   

      It always amazes me, when I pick up eggs from our hens, at how different they all can be. We get a variety of colors, as well as sizes. We have a few hens who lay some super jumbo eggs. We are talking they are so big they usually come in at 4 ounces, now that's a really big egg! Lately though most of our eggs are small/medium sized, except for the pip squeak one we got from our newly laying Sicilian Buttercup hen. Not much bigger than a quarter.







  To give you a better idea as to how small this egg is, here is a comparison of the various size eggs I get next to this tiny little egg. It looks so little next to all these other eggs.

      It will be awhile before we will ever be able to hatch her eggs, as our roosters are extremely bigger than our littlest hen. Until then though we do plan on hatching some eggs instead of buying chicks this year. We plan on doing 2 hatches.

  
     Our first hatch is going to be an Easter Egger batch. Breeding our rooster Curly with 5 different hens, 2 other Easter Eggers, Brown Leghorns, Anconas, and Golden-laced Wyandotte. Needless to say it will be an interesting batch of chicks and we cannot wait until these babies are peeping, but that won't be for at least 3 more weeks as we just started them in the incubator this morning. 

      

      We collected eggs over a period of a week. Each egg had the date and the hen/breed who laid it. Of all the eggs, we placed 5 from our EE hen "Roo" (far right), 4 from our other EE hen "Muff" (just left of Roo), 2 from our Golden-laced Wyandotte "Lacey", 3 from our Brown Leghorns, 2 from our Anconas. In total we were only able to place 16 eggs in our incubator. Hoping for some pretty birds and mostly hens at that. 

 Will keep you posted as how things go and of course the peeps when they hatch!