Day 6 - Candle Party

It's Sunday May 16th.  Today's the day that we're candling all the eggs.  We're so excited!

After washing our hands, Molly, my egg helper, gets all the white Leghorn eggs quickly into a clean egg carton.  We close the incubator leaving the brown eggs behind to stay warm.  We hurry off to the dark closet with flashlight in hand, and our notebook.

We work quickly candling the eggs starting at #1.  As we shine the flashlight into the egg, uh, oh #1 looks like a dud.  No veins, just a light colored yolk.  We move on to #2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.  They all show an embryo growing!  # 8 is a favorite as it's so easy to see the baby chick growing.

# 10 and #12 are also duds--with no signs of life.

#11 has an embryo too!

So out of 12 Leghorn eggs, 9 are growing and 3 are duds.  So if we do the math, that's 75% of the white eggs are growing embryos and 25% are duds.

#11 Leghorn egg showing great growth!
See the eye behind the X ?

We quickly return the white eggs to the incubator and take about 4 of the brown Australorp eggs to candle.  Wow!  The brown eggs are much harder to candle!  Do you know why?  It's their brown shell.  It doesn't let the light through as easily.  After a few minutes struggling to see inside the brown eggs, we decide it's taking too long and we're worried the eggs are cooling off.  So we decide to candle the brown eggs tomorrow.

Go to next day (Day 7) here.