We have had a brooding hen in the hen house for a couple of weeks. She was sitting on only one egg. A few days later, it was two eggs. For about a week and a half, our other hens stopped laying (or they were laying in the yard or woods somewhere).

About a week ago, Brian went out to check on her and the other hens had started laying again. She had abandoned the box with two eggs, and was now sitting on 12 eggs!

We spent a couple of days trying to figure out what to do. Should we wait, and see if any of them would hatch? Should we take them away? We ended up gathering them all up. Since they’d been in the hen house for so long, we didn’t want to eat them. Today, we cracked them open out of curiosity. Two of them had embryos in them. Here’s a picture of one:

I feel bad but Betty’s brooding severely impacted our edible-egg production. And, the other hens were clearly getting confused. We are going to order an incubator for when we need more chickens in the future. In the meantime, we’ll keep getting the eggs every day, even through that means reaching a hand under Brooding Betty’s big ole butt, and hoping she doesn’t peck us.

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