To increase the hatchability of your eggs - feed your breeding chickens a really good diet. I added fresh greens,wheat grass and sprouts, some fruit and vitamins, mayonnaise and applesauce. Everyone has their own recipe for adding nutrients to their chickens' food. I know some people use buttermilk or yogurt, and some chickens prefer certain things. I give all my chickens mealworms, and have been raising mealworms for a while, just to have a good access to them. So along with handling the eggs with care as I mentioned in September, a good diet is essential for a strong viable egg.
Mites! As I was reading information on breeding and care of chickens I glossed over the mites section. How can my chickens have mites? I asked myself. they have never even been outside, since I received them in October. Now that I look back on this, I laugh at my ignorance. You MITE ask yourself, Which came first, the mite or the chicken? Anyway, the sad story is that disregarding the suggestion that you should spray or dust your broody hen for mites at the beginning of setting, caused me to lose all my first meager hatch of about five chicks.
What happened was, I brought my little hen Queenie, who is so very tame, into the house with the two she hatched and the few that I hatched out of the incubator. I put them all together and she was a good mother. I did notice however that her body movements were very pronounced and sort of overdone, and she was scratching a lot. Her little chicks tried to stay out of her way when they were out, sort of like they were afraid. I had put her on a small blanket on the floor of my computer room with food and water and she did not leave the blanket or her new chicks and the new chicks stayed mostly under their mother venturing out for seconds at a time. At night, for some reason I placed her in a box with her chicks, I don't recall why I did this. But on the third day when I went to take her out of the box , all the little chicks were dead and I could see little bugs crawling all over them. You can imagine how bad I felt. I really was responsible for the death of my first chicks.
There is a lot of info on blogs about chicken mites. Just pay attention to this fact. Unless you do something on a routine basis, you will have problems, and you don't want the care you put into hatching a new flock of chicks to be ruined by mites.
