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WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU RECEIVE EGGS IN THE POST
Check for Hairline Cracks
Although a full blown crack is easy to spot in an egg, posted eggs can suffer hairline cracks and these aren’t so easy to detect. It is highly recommended that you become Sherlock Holmes in this case: put on your detective hat, go into a dark room and with a torch illuminate each egg all around it to look for any minor cracks that aren’t so visible in day light. What you can do with these eggs: you can seal the hairline cracks with beeswax or a couple of layers of nail polish. It has worked for us and for many others! The only downside to this is that these eggs are more prone to getting infected during incubation, so you will need to keep a close eye (and nose!) to make sure anything that starts smelling is immediately and carefully removed from your incubator. Infected eggs can explode and…oh my, they do stink!!
Check the Air Sacs – Oozing
Often, posties aren’t very caring to posted eggs. Many wouldn’t even read the label of the parcel to know that it contains eggs. As a result, some eggs can get scrambled during transport. Scrambled eggs have compromised air sacs (the air pocket or air cell, which is the space between the inner and outer shell membranes found at the blunt end of the egg and which helps the embryo breathe during incubation) or air sacs that are completely destroyed. Compromised air sacs may be salvaged if eggs are positioned properly inside an incubator, left unturned for the first 2-3 days, and the incubator is a really good one. Air sacs that are completely destroyed cannot be salvaged. These eggs will most likely start oozing in the incubator in the first few days. They can also get infected, so it’s best that oozing eggs are removed from the incubator.
Incubate Upright
The best position for incubating any egg, posted or not, is the upright position, with the pointy end down. But this is especially the case for posted eggs, as it allows the air sacs to settle and the embryo to start developing. Incubators with rollers don’t offer this option. We recommend that when you receive your posted eggs, you place them in a normal egg carton with the pointy end down overnight or for the first 1-2 days to allow the air sacs to settle. If your incubator positions eggs upright, you are all set! If it positions them on their side, you can try to incubate like that, but you may have higher success rate if you stop the automatic turning and place the eggs in your incubator inside an egg carton with the pointy end down. In this case you will have to manually turn them 2-3 times a day. It is more laborious, but it can help your hatching success, especially with posted eggs.
Accuracy
The accuracy of the incubator readings and the uniformity of temperature and humidity within it are two big questions and the reason why some incubators like the Brinsea and the RCOM are so much more expensive than others, like a Janoel for example. In all cases, it is highly recommended you have an inkbird hygrometer inside your incubator, in 2 or 3 different places, to make sure that there are not big fluctuations in the settings you have between different spots in your incubator. And also that the temperature and humidity are ideal.
From the above, it becomes clear that one cannot determine the fertility of posted eggs. There are so many variables that could have killed or compromised the embryos inside your posted eggs before they arrive and so incubating posted eggs is an entirely different process to incubating eggs that you collected.
And yes, we speak about embryos before incubation! The embryo in an egg is formed the moment the sperm enters that egg. It stays “dormant” until it is incubated. But it’s there and is a viable embryo!
We hope that this information can help improve your hatching rates from posted eggs and can also help adjust your expectations when it comes to incubating posted eggs. It is definitely an art, and it’s a lot of fun!!
With love,
Agia Skepi Team
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