The other week we had a candling session with some of our staff. Candling is when you take the egg, shine a light underneath it in the dark and are able to see a shadows from inside the egg.

If you were to candle an egg from the supermarket you would see

However, if you were to candle a fertile egg you would see

That picture there is of a fertile egg.

In the video below you can see some blood vessels and the embryo moving

I tried to get images and video of our own eggs but, it didn’t come out really well. All of these images are from Backyard Chicken Forum which is an eggcellent source of information all things chicken!

When we candled our own eggs a different time we were able to see the embryos moving and we all became very eggcited (sorry its too tempting not to use the word egg). When we first candled them on day 8 we could tell that some were not even fertilized and some had developed. Candling another time proved that some of those fertile eggs had stopped developing which is not uncommon when incubating eggs.

We just wont know the whole truth until hatching day which is just around the corner.

I am still working on a blog about the chicks parents so look for that too.