Can we hatch a super market egg in a incubator?

Question

Can we hatch a super market egg in a incubator?

Answer 1

For the most part, no. Commecial laying hens are nowhere near any roosters. Most people prefer infertile eggs because even a very immature fertile egg has a little red "blood spot" in it -- the embryo -- which most people don't like.

However, there are health food nuts who believe that fertile eggs are somehow more healthy, and fertile eggs are available (at a premium price) in some markets.

Answer 2

I'm sorry, but you folks are overlooking the fact that eggs have to be kept warm to hatch, and all supermarket eggs are kept in cold storage.  Putting these eggs into an incubator would accomplish nothing; if they were viable the cold would have killed them.

Answer 3

Nope. Those eggs are infertile. They have also been sitting on shelves in various places for a lot longer than they'd like you to think.

Answer 4

no, they are not fertile. they don't keep roosters with laying hens in those big commercial farming operations.

Answer 5

No. The eggs we eat are infertile - the hen lays them without ever coming into contact with a cockerel. In order for the egg to be fertile, the hen must have mated with a cockerel before laying. Even if supermarket eggs were fertile, being kept in a refrigerator would kill them.

Answer 6

That first answer is succinct, and correct. Supermarket eggs are not fertilized. Consumers would be quite grossed out if they cracked an egg to be fried and dropped a partially developed chicken into the frying pan.

The gestation period, i.e., from fertilization to birth, is only twenty-one days for a chicken. If a rancher suspects possible fertilization, an egg is “candled”. Looking at an egg with a bright light behind it will confirm the onset of that miraculous development  -- egg to chicken in twenty-one days.

Unable to improve on that first answer I relate the following freebie. As a former science teacher I would get a dozen fertilized eggs, and the loan of an incubator, from a local junior college. The carton would read “Eggs from hens with a college education.” After school on the 19th day of incubation I would carefully use a syringe to inject food coloring into the eggs. Chicks would break out with blue, green, red, or yellow down.

ps: Great question. But, remember, it's an incubator; not a incubator. Yeh, forgive me, I still try to teach.