Rainbow hatching eggs in New England

Available dozens are sent out once a week via email - these emails go to all members of the Ginger Bee Poultry mailing list. Joining the list is free, and you’re pretty much just going to get news on the poultry part of the farm. You’ll see pictures of the available dozens, their price, and some information about the eggs in them. If you’d like to reserve one or more of the dozens, reply to the original email stating the dozen(s) you want to purchase. If the dozen is still available, you’ll receive a reply with the purchase information. Payment is due within 20 minutes of receiving the purchase information. If at any point you’d like to leave the mailing list, feel free to let us know. A human being watches the inbox, not a robot or auto-response, so don’t hesitate to email if you have questions or concerns. 

Priority shipping is not cheap, and it can be hard on hatching eggs, so if you’d rather skip the extra expense, you can choose to pick up your eggs in person. Our farm is located in New Hampshire, about an hour north of Boston.

Shipping eggs is always a gamble, and once they leave our care, we can’t control what the Postal Service does with them. If you're buying from very far away, the chances your eggs will damaged are higher because they are in transit longer. However, we do everything in our power to make sure our eggs will get to you whole and unharmed with the best possible chance of hatching. We fertility test all our breeding pens, and each egg is candled to check for hairline cracks before it is packed. Individual eggs are gently wrapped padding material and set into an egg carton, air cell pointed up. The bubble wrap we use is made from 90% post-consumer recycled content, which is just about the closest we've found to a green padding solution that actually works to protect eggs. The carton is wrapped in more wadding and then double-boxed and padded with cushioning material, either biodegradable packing material, clean shredded feed bags, or both. The eggs are tucked in, then the box is taped securely and addressed. We add fragile labels and clear markings in the hope that the USPS treats the package gently. Again, we can’t promise every egg will be intact or that the hatch rate will be perfect, but as a test, we shipped a dozen eggs across the country to a relative in Seattle, WA. They were shipped on Monday and arrived on Friday - every egg inside the box arrived intact. Let us know if your eggs arrived damaged; if 25% or more of your eggs were delivered externally damaged, we'll refund the cost of shipping. 

We use USPS Priority Mail to ship eggs, meaning your package should arrive no more than three to four days after it has been shipped. When your eggs are sent out, you’ll get a USPS tracking number you can use to see where they are. We strive to ship only fresh, viable eggs, so the eggs you receive will be guaranteed less than 10 days old.

Egg color doesn’t always tell you what the chick who hatches from that egg will look like, or what egg that chick, if a pullet, will lay. Eggs are marked based on what the egg will hatch to produce or the traits of the egg’s parents. Here are the codes I use:

F1 - This means the first generation of a cross. An F1 Olive Egger is the offspring of a dark brown egg layer crossed to a blue egg layer.

F2 - The second generation of a cross. An F2 Olive Egger is the offspring of an F1 Olive Egger hen crossed with an F1 Olive Egger rooster.

BC - This means the offspring are a back cross (bred back to a breed already found in the parents’ pedigree). An F1 Olive Egger bred to a dark brown egg layer produces 50% Olive Egg laying offspring and 50% brown egg laying offspring.

Fi - This means one or both of the parents are fibromelanotic. The chick has at least a 50% chance of showing fibromelanism.

OE - Short for Olive Egger. In the F1 generation, all female offspring will lay olive eggs. In the F2 generation, 75% of the offspring will lay olive eggs and 25% will lay brown eggs.

EE - Short for Easter Egger, meaning the offspring of a tan/brown egg layer and a blue egg layer.

M - Short for Marans, a breed known for richly pigmented brown egg color. An egg marked with an M will produce a purebred Marans chick.

The short answer is no. Even in perfect conditions, a 100% hatch rate is quite uncommon. Not every embryo will develop into a chick, and various factors (temperature fluctuations, shipping stress, flock fertility) contribute to hatching success. An 80% hatch rate (out of 10 eggs, 8 hatch) is considered very good, and in shipped eggs, a 20-60% hatch rate is typical. There are certain steps you can take to increase your chances of hatching healthy chicks:

Let eggs rest, air cell (rounder end) up, for 24 hours after their arrival before putting them in your incubator.

Place eggs in a clean, sanitized incubator.

Maintain a consistent temperature and humidity in your incubator and prevent frequent fluctuation.

Candle eggs periodically and remove any empty or dead eggs.

Check your incubator frequently (at least twice a day) to protect against accidental outages or temperature/humidity fluctuation.

Increase humidity slightly during the lockdown period. 

You’ll receive an information sheet on how to incubate your eggs when they are delivered. That same information is below, and is sourced from Brinsea:

The incubation length for chicken eggs is 21 days.

Days 1-18: Your incubator should sit at between 99.3°F and 99.6°F for the majority of incubation. Its humidity should be 40%-50% RH.

Eggs should be turned (180° rotation) at least once a day.

Days 18-21 (Lockdown Period): Increase the humidity inside your incubator to 60%-65% RH. Stop turning eggs and do not open the incubator unless absolutely necessary. During lockdown, chicks will hatch and dry, and the correct humidity is crucial to ensuring they can emerge.

You can find a more detailed explanation of proper incubation on our Incubation Station page here.