a projecy i have given some thought to is what would it take to instill broodiness in traditionally non setting breeds of chickens.now and then someone will tell of their leghorn, etc. that covered eggs for a time and even hatched. since most bantams will set, could a standard rooster be used on a bantam hen of the same breed to begin recovery of the broody trait i dont think the bantam male could tread the full size hen. the small hen would still lay a small egg and wouldnt a percentage of these chicks reach near standard size.

Broodiness is dominant. If you crossed a Leghorn to a Silkie all the female progeny could go broody under the right conditions. There is more than one gene involved and it is a complex trait. The behavior is dominant, but it will not segregate in later generations as a simple dominant. You will be able to select the broodies every generation, but they will not fall in the expected genetic ratios.

This project would be of limited value. You could keep backcrossing the broody hybrids back to production Leghorns and keep selecting for the broody hens and then cross them back to Leghorns until you got something that looked and laid like a Leghorn, but would shut down and go broody every once in a while. The problem is that the birds are eating and not producing eggs when they are broody. I've seen some Leghorns gather eggs and exhibit broody behavior and keep on laying, but I don't know if they would be able to hatch any chicks. Everything doesn't seem to be wired quite right. If you got this type of broody hen you might be able to take the fresh eggs out of the nest each day and leave the ones that you want her to incubate in the nest. This wouldn't be very good for the hen because she needs some exercise, good feed and a lot of water to keep on laying, and good moms only eat and drink once a day for around 15 minutes. A laying hen would spend a lot more time off the nest eating and drinking.

Most production birds (like Leghorns and
Production Reds that lay in confinement houses)
only live for one season. I am aware of an effort at
Hy-Line to develop a 3 year layer (1000+ eggs) but
the usual commercial Leghorn pullet lays for one
season only, then she winds up in the can of
Campbell's chicken noodle soup.

I propose that broodiness in not necessarily bred
out of these birds, but rather, broodiness is bred
out of their first season. i.e. they don't go broody in
their first season. This is all the commercial
operations care about, since they don't usually
keep birds longer than that. If a line of Leghorns
tends toward broodiness in their 3rd year, the
corporation couldn't care less and the trait would
usually not be observed by the grower.

I don't have much data to support my claim. We
have some anecdotal information, but anecdotal
information is the most unreliable of all. Our
observations of broody Production Reds and
Leghorns is that the broody is virtually always a
hen and not a pullet (more than a year old) and
usually a hen of several years of age.

Infomaniac, I also believe the same theory on broodiness being bred out of only the first laying cycle. It seems none of my leghorn pullets set, but the hens do occassionally. In fact, I have 2 buff leghorn bantams on eggs right now. Since the commercial layers are used only for a season, maybe two at the most, no r & d has been done concerning the prevention of later life broodiness.

i agree there would be little interest in this broodiness for commercial poultrymen. it could be advantagous to the hobbyist.it is something that could be developed while also breeding for other qualities.it would be little problem to retain several older hens to test the theory they go broody in 2nd or 3rd year.

Broodiness is considered a threshold trait. This just means that something like hormone levels or something else has to pass a certain level before the behavior is triggered. The evidence indicates that there are at least two ways to block broodiness because two non broody lines can be crossed and you can get broody progeny. This seems to indicate that lack of broodiness is recessive and that different recessive defects are in the two different lines. When they are crossed together you get complimentation. One line is AAbb and the other is aaBB and when you cross them you get AaBb and the dominant alleles complement each other.

Older hens seem to make better moms so older hens may be able to exceed the threshold and become broody in non broody lines. The old literature does indicate that older birds do express more broody behavior when they were selecting against the trait in commercial lines. I don't know if this is true for todays commercial lines.

This is consistent with what we have observed with
our lines of Production Reds and Leghorns... lines
in which one would not expect to see much
broodiness.... and we don't... until the hens start to
age... then WE DO!!!!

it seems to me then, that, we should use the older birds to select for any desired trait, shouldnt they exhibit most traits,more as they age. as anexample, an individual hound may run a scent trail in the proper direction and when he reaches age 6 he will begin to backtrack,if this dog sires many pups as a young sire,we are promoting this trait before we know it.

Fairful had an article a few years ago where they demonstrated that the genetic components of the traits changed as the birds aged. This sounds funny because you think a bird has only so many genes, but the genes that are selected for the first year are a slightly different set than the genes selected for in later years. This just means that certain genes have greater effects at different times in the birds lifetime and that you have to select at those ages to more acurately select for those traits.

Until we select birds at the two different ages we won't know if the two sets are compatible and that we can improve both ages. The problem may be that there may be a negative correlation between the genes selected for young production and those selected for aged production.

Industry hasn't selected 2 year old hens because it costs money to feed the birds that long and maintain records, and the industry didn't rely on getting more than one years production out of a bird. It is becoming more common to force molt the birds and send them through another cycle of production, so the breeders will likely start selecting for it.

This has nothing to do with the above posts but...

Is it true that chicks from and raised by older hens have better disease resistance?

Hens put antibodies into each of their eggs. These antibodies are to specific pathogens that the hen has encountered. For the first few days the chicks have better resistance to those diseases. So chicks hatched from eggs of hens on your farm would be more likely to have some temporary resistance to the diseases found on your farm. I don't know of any research showing that older hens convey more resistance, but I'd guess that it could be partially true. The longer she lived the more pathogens she would have survived and produced antibodies too, but most of her antibodies would be made to the pathogens that she has most recently encountered.

There is also genetics. You can breed resistance to disease, so survivors may have more of the genes needed to fight the diseases in your area.