Are these puchased eggs or hatching from your own layers?
These are from our own birds. I had about 47 BW left over that I bought for dog training.
Why are you holding them for ten days prior to setting?
We are trying to hold them for as long as we can to get enough to put in the incubator. 10 days gets us around 50-60 eggs. I have read that you can hold them for up to 10 days and it is hard to remember that many years ago but I thought that is what I held them before with a much better hatch rate.
How long after scheduled hatch date do you pull the plug on the ones that haven't hatched yet?
Usually 3-4 days unless I can hear chirping in the egg.
I moved 18 chicks from the incubator last night, they had been in there for since sometime the night before and still had not gotten dried out. I went ahead and moved them into a brooder box with a heat lamp that is around 100-102 degrees but they have room to move away from the heat if it is too much and they started dying off like crazy. I lost nine of them but there were some in the incubator that didn't look like they were doing well either so it was probably those.
Is the humidity too high and that is why they are not drying out? There is no fan in the incubator either, maybe that would help? I don't remember this being a problem before, it seems like the chicks hatched, almost every egg, dried out in a few hours and i moved them. It seemed very simple. This time I am having a rough time.
Thanks for your help.