What chickens do you have?

[Celice]

wow! it's hot here but my hens are producing like MAD! I'm getting 8+ eggs a day. I'm even starting to sell hatching eggs on ebay and I'll have to put up a sign eggs for sale. I'm getting too many!

 

[FourRingCircus]

cool!! I'm thinking about getting some marans I'm loving those really dark eggs

They really are pretty, and a nice contrast to the other eggs.

They are that dark only for a year or so, and then they start getting lighter. Ours are... wow... 2 1/2 years old now. The marans eggs we get now are still large, but they're not dark. They're varying amounts of speckled, on a regular brown egg surface. Sometimes they'll have dark bumps on them, other times they look like they have spray paint overspray on them -- sometimes in bands, so they look like sand sculptures. So they're still different and pretty.

__________ Sun Aug 09, 2015 11:46 pm __________

We are still getting frequent blue eggs and green eggs from 2 1/2 and 3 year old chickens. We know that some of our hens are no longer laying, though, so we're putting them in the tractor two at a time for a couple of weeks, so see if we can identify who is no longer producing.

Problem is, it's gotten so hot, our general egg production has been cut by more than 50% just in the last week. So the girls that are in there now may be in there for some extra time, just to be fair.

Great idea on weeding out the non-layers! There was a thread on Backyard Chickens that talked about using a gloved hand to actually feel for eggs being produced in the vent, but I never tried it.

 

[Miss M]

Great idea on weeding out the non-layers! There was a thread on Backyard Chickens that talked about using a gloved hand to actually feel for eggs being produced in the vent, but I never tried it.

Wow, I hadn't heard of that. One of our neighbors tries his hens like this in a pen built of 1x2s, so that's where we got the idea.

He gives them enough time to settle in so they feel comfortable laying again. I don't remember how long he gives them, but we figured two weeks was plenty. A week to settle in, a week to show us whether they're still laying.