Chicken Breeding Basics for Broody Hens and Incubators
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- Опубліковано 14 чер 2019
- We breed Buff Orpington chickens and you might be thinking that you'd like to give it a try. In that case, this video is for you and will give you some of the basic information you need to get started.
The equipment we show:
Brinsea Incubator: amzn.to/2WDiBbd
Titan Brooder: amzn.to/2ZeMcVk
Open Feeder with removable legs: amzn.to/2XE5xil
Large Drinker: amzn.to/2WxbXyx
Music credits:
Artist = Earth Tree Healing
Composer = Claudine West
Website = claudinewestmusic.com/earth-t...
This is an excellent video, very informative and clear. Thank you.
Thank you so much! That's very kind of you
I'm new to the chicken world and this will be my first year starting with day old chicks...thank you so much for the video I loved it, please keep them coming!
Glad it was helpful 🙂
THIS really answers ALL of my questions! THANK YOU! ☺
You are so welcome
Thank You so much for being so educative! Thank you !
I'm glad it was helpful
Thanks for sharing, your experience and wisdom is appreciated
You are very welcome
Excellent video. Well structured and informative. Thanks very much.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Very good and informative. Thank you for the great video.
Thank you so much ☺
Your chickens are so beautiful and healthy thank you for taking time to make a good video
Thank you 🙂
Thank you. You covered all I needed to know.
So glad it was useful 🙂
great video. very good information and easy to follow. I also love your flock setup. best of luck to you and your flock!
Thanks so much!
Your chickens are so beautiful and healthy 😍😍🥰😚
Thank you!
Lovely video
Thank you!
Thanks I appreciate your help 😊
Any time 🙂
very nice video
Thank you!
Great video. What a beautiful house you have. My main question about breeding chickens is what to do with the male chicks?
Some we pass on to other breeders as breeding cockerels, some we sell with unrelated hens as starter flocks but most we process as table birds when they reach maturity
Hi just wondering can you have a broody hen and her chicks/ eggs indoors in a seperate part of the chicken coop?
Yes you can. However your other hens will try and lay their eggs in the broody hens nest. You will have a higher risk of the eggs breaking but unless the shells are weak it's still a low risk. One thing I would advise is to mark the broody hens eggs with a marker pen so that if another hen does lay any eggs in the nest in the 21 days of incubation, you can identify them as the eggs without marks and remove them.
I hope that helps.
Hi just wondering if you are able to hatch chicks under a broody hen inside a chicken house that has a seperate place for them?
Good question. You can however the danger is that other hens will try to lay in the same spot as your broody so you need to be able to distinguish between the eggs. For example another hen could add a new egg at day 12. That egg will not have enough time to develop before the others are hatched on day 21, plus it's possible that the broody hen can't cover any more eggs so the new egg pushes a viable egg out of the nest.
If you need to use this approach, the best thing to do is mark the hatching eggs under the hen with pen so you can identify them. As other hens lay their eggs you'll know these are the eggs without pen markings and you can remove them.
I hope that helps.
@English country life do chickens mate for egg they produce or mate once for all the eggs?
Thanks for your time
Hi, if a cockerel mates with a hen she will produce fertile eggs for the next 7 days.
I think we will use an incubator. We have 3 commercial brown hens. I have a friend that hatches chicks so I could ask him for some I was just wondering what coop you would recommend nd for chicks. What is the one you have called??.
Thank you for being so helpful.
Hi Luc.
OK, you are looking for two main things:
1) A good sized run with the coop
2) The ability to run electricity to the coop which will include:
a) An outdoor, waterproof extension lead like this amzn.to/36mxHos
b) A brooder plate to keep the chicks/youngsters war, for the first 6-8 weeks as they will be unable to regulate their own temperatures. We use Titan brooders like this one amzn.to/2MkinC3
c) A coop with a good sized run as youngsters are very active. We have this one as a brood coop:
amzn.to/2Mi6koL
This is single level so easy for youngsters to navigate and it is a good size inside for the first few days/weeks weather dependent when you don't let them into the run. N.B. There is a gap under the coop which you will need to block with either a piece of wood or chicken wire to prevent the chicks crawling from the run, under the coop and escaping.
Hello,
We have 3 chickens and we want to expand our flock by raising some chicks, we dont have a rooster our coop only holds 4 chickens so we were wondering if we needed another coop. Our coop is an Omlet eglu go up. What coops do you have and could you show me where to get one? How many eggs as a minimum should we get? And finally, do we need to move our chicks around our garden, do they make a mess like our chickens now!!!
Thank You
Ps. Your videos are amazing !!
I think the first question is are you going to hatch using an incubator or using a broody hen? If you bear in mind that if you want 3 hens you will need on average 6 eggs to hatch as there will be on average 3 hens and 3 cockerels. If you have 6 more chickens in your coop shortly before they mature can you fit them in with your existing chickens (I'm sorry I don't know the breeds you have or would like to hatch).
My brother and I are starting chickens and I was wondering how to keep your genetics diverce in a small flock. We are doing buff Orpingtons.
The easiest way is to use a new, unrelated cockerel each breeding season. We accomplish this by buying in some eggs each year from different breeders, hatching them, and keeping only the best cockerel from that batch. We keep breeding hens from our own bloodline. There is no inbreeding this way
Hi i have a rooster and 8 hens and
i was just wondering how you know when an egg is fertile and which ones to put under a broosy hen/incubator?
Hi 🙂
If they are all kept together, all eggs gave an equal chance of fertility provided that
They are less than 2 weeks old
Have not been washed
Have not been refrigerated
Have been stored pointy end down
After 7 days of incubation, you should be able to tell which eggs are fertile by "candling" the eggs
If no eggs are fertile then there is likely to be an issue with the cockerel.
Hope that helps?
Hi English country life I would like to ask you a question do you cream legbars go broody
No, generally Cream Legbars are not broody. Ours aren't but we keep them as egg layers to provide us with eggs while the Orpingtons brood and raise chicks otherwise we'd be egg-less for weeks 😁
don’t the chicks require a different type of food how do u go about doing that if using the hen great vid btw
The entire flock eat chick crumb when the chicks are small - the hens don't mind. We give the hens some coarse oyster shell for calcium but the chicks ignore that
Hi English country life I would like to ask you a question can a rooster breed with his offspring
Yes he can. The thing to bear in mind is that the laws of genetics still work. Each time a related Rooster breeds with a related hen the risk of abnormalities increases. For 1 generation it's unlikely that you will have any problems but unless you introduce a new bloodline for another season (assuming your flock is not HUGE where there will enough genetic diversity to cope) you may start having problems such as low hatch rates. If you continue year on year the risks become higher for deformities too.
Does that make sense?
We introduce a new bloodline every year with an unrelated cockerel.
Should I be separating the rooster from the hens if the hens are broody and laying on the eggs that are fertilized? But lets say the chicks hatch should I move the rooster?
Hi. Great question.
In a wild environment a broody hen will remove itself from the flock and raise the chicks around the flock but not sleeping in the same spot as the flock. The ideal environment is to give the broody hen and eggs/chicks a separate coop to sleep in.
If this is not possible, there are 2 problems:
1) While sitting on the eggs the other hens will push the broody hen out to lay their eggs in the same spot so it's really important that the fertilsed eggs that are t be hatched are marked so that you can remove an new eggs that are laid. If the additional eggs are not removed the hatch rate will be reduced as the hen can only sit on a limited number of eggs. Once this limit is passed, eggs will be rolled out and you may end up with an egg incubated for 19 days being rolled out to allow for an egg just laid.
2) When the chicks hatch, the broody hens will be VERY protective. It is possible (not certain) that the broody hen could make the other chickens leave the coop. It's also possible that there will be fights, or it may be very calm. Nothing is certain but it is a risk leavng the chickens in the same coop.
Doe that help?
Hi! I am a hen owner.My hen used to lay eggs but died for no reason we really loved her...could there be a reasoning behind this and also her name was sugar and she died in winter. Anyway hope to hear from you soon! Really like your videos, fan from India!
From so far away I could not possibly say what the cause of her death is but hens do have a limited life span unfortunately. I am sorry you lost her.
An incubator also comes in handy when your hen decides not to be brooding anymore and she has a clutch of eggs.
Very true
Hallo, really nice video! you are one of my lighthouses on youtube :). I wonder if you sell hatching eggs.. if yes, abroad too? thanks a lot
Hello Attillio & thanks for the lovely comment. We don't sell hatching eggs abroad sorry as we find air transport damages the viability. Really sorry
@@EnglishCountryLife ok, thanks anyway
So how do I encourage my rooster to mate with my hen
If he's mature (6 months or more) he shouldn't need any encouragement, it's a natural instinct
How long do chicks take to hatch
21 days
What tipe of chickens do you have
The large orange ones are Buff Orpingtons - a traditional dual purpose breed. We also keep Crested Cream Legbars, Marans and Old English Pheasant Fowl
Have you ever crossed the Orpington with the cream legbars
All of the hens including the Cream Legbars were running with the cockerel so we could have laid some for intubation but we decided not to.
The benefit of the Cream Legbars is that we can differentiate their eggs easily from the Orpingtons so we guarantee everytime that any eggs laid are pure Orpington.
The reason we chose not to incubate hybrids is that we couldn't guarantee the egg colour any hen would lay and we need to know which are Orpingtons and which aren't.
Does that help? Sorry for the ramble.....
Because for the past 6 years when I was raising chickens and coming up to 2 years we have moved to a house with a tiny garden so I had to give them up.
And for those years I was raising different breeds from those production reds all the way to silkies
So what I have decided that I want to raise blue and buff Orpington’s plus some legbars so that’s why I was asking if your legbars have gone broody
@@samerbako2358 If you want all of your hens to be broody they're not the breed for you but we love having them around. Laying blue eggs we can keep them with the Orpingtons all of the time and we still get eggs when the Orpingtons are broody. They're real characters. Lots of people describe them as flighty but they just live life 3 times as fast as the Orpingtons. They're not jumpy or scared of their own shadow. Give them a try and let us know how you get on 👍
Hi Fiona I really like your videos! In January of this year I bought 7 chicks but they are all girls, but who sold them to me, moved to another city and I lost track of them. I want to get them a boyfriend but be an Orpington rooster like them. Do you sell roosters? and how much do they cost?...Fiona please excuse me, because I don't speak English, I tried to explain the point to you the best I can.
Hi. We do sell but only in the UK and we won't have any to sell until approximately September.
In the UK lots of people use Preloved.com for selling their chickens. You may find another breeder closer to you with roosters for sale.
Good luck
anyone made a home made incubator? my son asked
I imagine that it could be done, but modern incubators are very sophisticated. A simple temperature controlled box should be achievable though
Aren't cockerels neutered males?
A cockerel is a young (less than one full year) cock chicken. I think perhaps you are thinking of "capon" which is the term for a neutered male chicken? Hugh
@@EnglishCountryLife Yes, thank you! I got them mixed up
@@jencaisse7392 There are a confusing set of terms and the English terms differ from American ones (e.g. a cock not a rooster). Some are less common so a pullet is an immature hen like a cockerel is an immature cock. It only matters if you are breeding 😉
Hugh
@@EnglishCountryLife Sounds good :) I wont any time soon, but i do plan to breed some day for my dogs cats etc. I was talking about cocks and how they're roosters at one point with friends, but cock only has one meaning here ig, and it's not a male chicken xD
@@jencaisse7392 Strange how words evolve. The rude connotation actually comes from the polite, accurate term meaning any male bird. "Cock pheasant" is still used by the the smartest people in the shooting sets here.
HHHi
Hi!
@@EnglishCountryLife I love yourbackground wow
@@adamluka7984 Thank you
Do not buy Chinese incubators dessert Brinsea is excellent
Agree completely
@@EnglishCountryLife if you knock a hen out of clock because you have too many broody hens at the moment will she clock again in months down the line
@@loyalstar9829 Some hens will repeatedly attempt to brood but others won't. Hormone levels vary hugely between breeds & individuals so its impossible to accurately predict