DAY 15

I lost another egg today :( the power cut must have weakened the peep inside and then it died soon after.

I now only have two left, fingers crossed everything will be ok with them....and that they arn't both cockerels!

After candling the eggs I noticed that one was looking more 'watery' inside (not dark and full of healthy blood vessels like the other two). And after a day of waiting to make sure it wasnt still alive, I decided to remove the egg so it didn't infect the other two.

When I opened the egg it was clear that the peep had died and that the embryo was beginning to break down into a mush *_*

It's really upsetting when the chicks fail to develop after all the effort I have put into turning them and keeping them safe :(

POWER CUT!!!

I woke up yesterday to find out that there had been a power cut during the night! I feared the worst and quickly checked the incubator to see if all was well with the eggs.

Luckily the incubator must have a small internal battery somewhere, because the count down was still reading 9 days....thanks R-com!

I have no idea how long the power was off for, so I candled the eggs to see if all was ok. There is movement in all 3 eggs ^_^ so hopefully the peeps were not harmed by the power cut. I guess in nature the mother hen does leave the nest occasionally....so hopefully all will be ok.

Not long left to go now ^_^ 6 days!!! They will be due on bonfire night weekend too, so i hope the fireworks dont scare them too much.

DAY 11

I have been candling the eggs all weekend and there is so much going on inside that its hard to see anything. One of the eggs, however, hasn't shown any development since day 7 and had started to show a blood ring (meaning that bacteria has got inside the egg).

Today I removed the 'dead egg' to stop the others going bad. Above are two photographs of chick embryos. The top image shows that an 11 day old embryo should look like and the bottom image shows the embryo from the dead egg. As you can see, the peep has only developed to 'day 7' stage, at day 11 it should be much bigger than this and you should see claws and a beak.

DAY 7

The chooks are even bigger today! You can see the embryo shape, and if you watch very carefully they actually move and kick! ^_^ You can also see their eyes beginning to form (shows as small black dot in photo).

DAY 6

I candelled the eggs again today and they have grown even bigger!

The largest of the eggs still showed no spider shape, and the pores in the shell were becomming more pronounced. These are all signs of an unfertillized egg, so I took it out of the incubator and broke it open just to satisfy my curiosity. It was indeed empty (I would have been mortified if it hadnt!) and so I'm now down to four eggs :(

DAY 5

LOOK! I candelled the eggs on day 5 to find small spider like shapes ^_^ These are the chicks beginning to form inside the eggs. They are barely visible through the blue shells but they are definately there.

One of the eggs doesn't have a little spider yet, it may be empty :(

DAY TWO - FIVE

Can't really see much happening inside the eggs this early on. The blue shells of the eggs also make candelling difficult, however, you can see the yolk changing to a deeper colour.

I'm trying to turn the eggs every couple of hours when I can, 3 times minimum. Also, I have read that the eggs need to face up alternate sides each night otherwise the chick may stick to the inside of the shell! To make sure this doesnt happen I have put crosses on all of the eggs, that way the eggs can be 'X' side up one night, then 'blank' side up the following night.

DAY ONE

After letting the eggs rest for 24 hours, I then put 5 out of the 6 eggs into the R-com mini incubator (this is all I could fit). This type of incubator is only supposed to hold 3 eggs, but if you keep the plastic hatching tray in, this allows you to put in as many as you can fit! It does mean you have to hand turn, but at this point I had no idea which eggs were fertile, so the plan was to put them all in, and hopefully at least 3 would be fertile.