If you have had problems with bad hatches in the past, candling can sometimes help to see what goes wrong and give you some ideas to try to fix the problem for subsequent hatches as well. Keep a notebook and make frequent notations on your eggs. This way, you can determine if you need more humidity, less humidity or note any other thing that may occur, such as the early demise of the embryo, power outage, or even unusual weather events. Candling can give you an idea if the egg is progressing or whether there is a problem. As its’ name implies, originally, candling was done with a candle!

The secret to your success will be keeping good notes on every egg. You should note the temperature and humidity of the incubator, day #, air cell size in your notebook. Some folks note the ambient temperature and humidity too. A thin ring around the inside of the egg indicates an early death. The embryo died at the start of incubation, usually within a couple of hours. These eggs are easy to identify and remove, and I have included a photo below.

How to Make Egg Candles  – Materials

As tempting as it may be, try not to candle daily. It can influence growth and development from repeated interruptions. We hope you enjoyed learning about candling, and perhaps you learned something too! Let us know in the comments section below… We may think that 21 days to hatch is really fast (it is), but the changes happening inside the egg are small and difficult to monitor on a day-to-day basis even though they are continuous. Day 7 – should show an increase in the size of the vein web. You should also see the start of the air cell at the blunt end of the egg. Try to candle all the eggs on Day 7. Egg candlers can be mains powered or battery operated. They tend to come in two varieties: The first is like a torch with a rubber seal around the end, and the second is a table-top unit with a place to sit the egg.

Perhaps one of the most important pieces of information is the size of the air cell. We have talked about this briefly in other articles, so that we will expand a little here.Blue or green eggs can also cause some difficulty reading them because of the pigment being inclusive in the shell. Egg candling is a neat, cheap, and easy way to discover what is happening inside the egg, but how do you do it?

Now carefully pour the wax into the funnel until it spills over and remove the funnel. Make sure the wax is not too hot. Candling will not tell you if the egg is fertilized until Day 4 or so, when the veins start to develop. Marking The EggsTo be honest, a small ultra-bright torch is all you need, you can use your hand between the egg and torch to make a good seal. Candling an egg allows you to see in a limited way what’s going on inside an egg at particular points along the way to full development.