Incubating Chicken Eggs - Candling

     So it is the evening of May 23 and it has been about six days since I started to incubate 39 chicken eggs. Tonight seemed like a good time to candle the eggs and see how things are progressing.  There was only one of the 39 that was definitely not fertile.  However, the other 38 eggs weren't all exactly the same.  Some of the variation in appearance stems from the fact that a little less than half of the eggs have dark brown shells. That still did not account for all of the variability as some of the blue Ameracauna eggs seemed to be further along than other blue eggs.

   I consulted the incubation book I have on loan along with the incubator.  I found there were quite a few factors that could account for this variation in the progress of the eggs, with the most important probably being the age of the egg, and storage temperature and humidity.  The book recommended that no eggs be kept longer than a week before incubating.  I think my oldest eggs were eight days old. The most recent eggs have the lowest numbers so I should be able to check and see if the newer eggs doing the best.

    We had hula practice at our house this evening. The local grand daughters will be performing in our ward talent show on Saturday.  They are going to do the Hukilau Song and Pupu.  Some good friends provided us with some nice shells for the little girls' Pupu dance. Pupu means seashell in Hawaiian.  I've also got them doing some back up vocal and less structured hula dancing while I sing and play the Hawaiian War Chant. I think it will be pretty fun. I need to make sure we get a video of their performance.

"Pupu Hinuhinu E" translates loosely to "Very Pretty Shell"

    We had a shipment of 100 Carniolan queen bees arrive for the bee store this morning. I spent an hour or so in marginal weather conditions getting them transferred to a queen bank.  It is so much nicer to work with honey bees when the weather is warm and sunny. Just as I finished up with the queen bank my niece Katherine arrived with her two little girls and a friend who is interested in taking up beekeeping. We had a nice lunch followed by a little tour of the Beez Neez.  As the little girls tried out Linda's new teeter-tooter it occurred to me that I was their "Gruncle" as in Gravity Falls.  If I carried that contraction to its logical conclusion I suppose that would make them my "Grieces"which doesn't sound as nice as "Gruncle".

The corks in the end of the queen cages need to be replaced with candy plugs

The light bees on the outside are Italians while the dark queen inside is a Carniolan

Queen bees installed in the rack