Let me preface this with the fact that we have almost all brown eggs some pretty dark brown.
You need a high intensity light to accurately candle the dark brown eggs. These lights have fans to cool them. The flashlight candlers don't work very well when the shell is too dark. If you have a slide projector or you know a friend with one you could probably rig up a foam oval that you could put over the lens to block the light and make a hole for you to put the egg.
Kari, let me answer your questions in order:
We candled our eggs yesturday... they are a week in the incubator. Got a few definate positives... wiggling, blood vessels and all. They were mostly in the light brown and white eggs.
But we had a few that seemed to be half black and half light on the inside. No evident sign of a peep. And the black area seems stuck to one side of the egg although some of it floats around a bit. These were mostly in the dark brown eggs.
I am scared that these are bad eggs and that they will explode and ruin my good eggs.
I already had 8 eggs start weeping after only 3 days incubation... a couple exploded outside of the incubator. I pitched them all.
We had a couple no growth, clear with a small light ring on the inside....
Questions:
1)What should I do about these half dark/half light eggs??? I don't want to crack open any eggs that have peeps in them but I don't want to contaminate my good eggs with exploding bad eggs.
2)How long does it usually take before a bad egg explodes??
3)Can you ever see into an egg with a very dark shell and see anything without a professional candler?
Thanks
Kari
By Rokimoto on Friday, April 12, 2002 - 06:30 pm:
For white eggs telling potential exploders is fairly easy. They will have a even gray cast to the inside of the egg and normal healthy eggs will have the golden yolk glow along with healthy blood vessels. It gets harder to tell as the embryos get larger, but if you shine the candler light up from the bottom of the egg 14+ day embryos will leave an area in the pointed end clear with the embryo floating up into the large end. If this open space is gray or as dark as the upper part with the embryo you probably have an contaminated egg. After 18 days the whole egg will look like it fills as the chick grows.
All bets are off for blue shelled eggs and dark brown eggs because you can't tell when they are graying up and bacteria are growing in the egg.
Once you have candled a couple hundred eggs you will know the abnormal ones. The eggs with dark spots in them probably will not explode, but they may not hatch either. It sounds like the embryo is not developing normally. At 10 days of age the embryo should be able to swim inside the egg. If you hold the egg still and you can see the spot moving around, it is probably doing OK. Immobile spots are usually embryos that have gotten stuck to the egg shell membranes and they don't develop normally.
The bacteria must be getting in the egg while it is still in the hen. I can't imagine having this many exploders. If the eggs are clean, something is probably wrong with the birds. Is your source NPIP.
You may want to treat your chicks with an antibiotic when they hatch. You can get "mushy" chicks that are infected with bacteria inside the egg. You can tell these chicks because they are lethargic and they smell bad. Since you have so many exploders, you can probably count on seeing some mushy chicks. Mushy chicks rarely survive even if you treat them with antibiotic.
By Aram_Seattle on Friday, April 12, 2002 - 06:48 pm:
1) The half/half eggs are probably fertile. I had similar eggs and when I cracked one open, and I immidiately became pro-life activits :))), cause it hurts to kill a living creature that could not even peck you back.
2) Before a bad egg explodes, it oozes icki looking thing out of it and it smells. Unless your eggs are covered with muck and you washed them in cold water, I would not do anything to them. I have eggs that were incubating for 15 days, and after I opened the clear ones, they still looked nice and fresh, though the white was kind watery. I even ate them, because the hen deposits a protection on top of the egg that prevents bacteria and such from going in. All they are are eggs that are a little warm, that's it.
3) For candling I have a 100W bulb in a box with a quarter size hole. When I candle Welsummer eggs (dark brown) I do it by candling the pointed end. If the egg looks all nice and rediant like a christmas light, I think you can cook it :). The pointed end is where the egg white is, so if you candle that part, you are more likely to see the embrio in the middle. Try to gently roll the egg around the "light hole" and you'll see what I mean. Looking at the dull end is also a good way to check the size of the air hole, which should get bigger with time.
Personnally, I was never able to see the blood vesels like you did on my RIR. What I saw was a washer shaped dark mass (that was kinda stuck to one side, even though I rotated eggs) and it seemed to move horizontal to the ground as I moved the eggs. That seems to me what you are seeing too. So, do yourself a favor. Get the humidty to 50% and leave the eggs alone. Then increase humidity to 75% after 18th day and definitely, leave the eggs alone untill they hatch and run around for 5 hours or so. After they make initial pip in the shell, it might take them 18 hours to begin breaking out. So don't worry, they are not dead, just resting. :)))))