Ok, I stole these pictures from http://www.nifty-stuff.com/candling-eggs.php, but so many of us are talking about Candling Eggs, I thought this would be a neat subject for today's post.
Candling is the process of telling if your eggs are fertilized and you should continue to devote incubator space to them. All you need to conduct candling is a dark room and a high powered flashlight. Take one hand and make an "O" out of it. Place the egg on the top of your hand. Put the flashlight under the egg, using the cupped hand to block out any external light. What you should see is something like the following:
This is an unfertilized store bought egg. Everything is uniform an you can't see any signs of development.
This is a 1 day old fertilized egg. You can see what looks like a yolk formed at one end. This egg will grow into a chicken with the proper temperature and humidity.
This is a two day old fertilized egg. You can already see the development of blood vessels when you candle it and you can see how much it has grown in just 24 hours.
The three day old egg looks remarkably different from the unfertilized egg. The embryo takes up almost the entire interior of the egg now. This chick is well on it's way to hatching. The normal gestational period of an egg is 21 days. This is a great activity to do with your kids. They'll enjoy it and you end up with cute fuzzy chickens.
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