The incubator on the right is the one without a working door this year... If you recall, I left them out int eh summer 2 years ago and the front doors warped so they would not seal. We replaced 2 doors and mode those useable, but the third is not working yet.
Unfortunately we had a little mishap.. I washed the incubator egg trays in the dishwasher on the "sanitize" cycle. Nice and clean but.. yes.. warped! Now we can only fit 36 eggs per tray, like turkeys. The rest we put on the bottom and will manually turn them until the first candling.
The exciting part is.. this is a winter flock! These hens layed eggs without light. The means their offspring are much more likely to lay in the winter consistently, even without light. We will have a steady supply of fresh eggs all next winter.
When summer comes, we will hatch another flock in the middle of summer. The offspring from summer laying hens are much more likely to lay in the heat of summer.
In theory, we will have a fairly steady supply of eggs year round!
UPDATE: at 1am last night I heard odd noises and found that one incubator had jammed. The plate on the automatic tray turning mechanism had broken in two. That allows the tray to keep moving and jam against the top of the cabinet. It actually bent the metal arm into a S shape! Fortunately only 1 egg was damaged. But that did require half the night to clean up the extra incubator, switch out the doors and move all the eggs over.
ReplyDeleteOh the life of a farmer!