I candled the eggs again yesterday and, out of the original 42, I am down to 10. I’ve left 12, but the other two, I’m 90% sure have stopped. Brian and I were talking and he’s going to try to see what he can do to improve this incubator, but we’re looking into buying a new and better incubator shortly after the first of next year.

I’m praying that these 10 make it to the end, but the temps are still fluctuating. Thank goodness I’ve been home most of the time or I wouldn’t even have these 10. These are due to hatch the first of next week, so we’ll just wait and see. I will be candling again on day 18 which is the day that I will take them out of the turner and lay them down so they can get into position for hatching.

Since I do need more buff orpingtons in my flock this year, we are going to order a few more chicks to add in. Hopefully they’ll be here in the next couple of weeks.

Yesterday was day 10, so I candled them last night. I removed 9 that were obviously “gone”. They either had blood rings in them (where it started developing and then stopped), cracked (2), or obviously clear (never started developing). Most of them were my eggs, so it may be that they were not being mated with very much and the eggs were not fertile. I’ll check them later today. There were 22 out of the remaining 32 that are very questionable. Most of those I believe were clear, but with the darker shells, it’s hard to tell for sure, so I’ll give them a little more time in there to make sure. I’ll candle again on day 14, and then again on day 18 before I stop turning them.

We’re still having major problems with temperature fluctuations. It wants to either go way up or way down. It seems like no matter what I do, I cannot keep it constant. Since this is our last hatch of the year, I will be looking into a different incubator before hatching any next year. This is just too much. I know that’s part of my problem with this hatch. When it spiked to almost 115* it killed off several of my eggs. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I can do about that. It was holding steady and then suddenly spiked. Oh, well. I’ll keep you posted on the progress of the remaining 32 eggs, so keep checking back for more updates!

I forgot to post this last week, but I set some more eggs last Monday night, so my 21 day count started Tuesday.