You should stop turning the eggs about three days before they are scheduled to hatch. Tired guineas, homemade incubator, duck eggs in foreground. You’ll need to turn those eggs three times per day, making sure that the pointy ends always rest lower than the more rounded ends, and the symbols will help you determine when you have completed that task. Marking the Spot and Hitting the Markīefore laying the eggs on their sides in there too, draw an X on one side of each with a pencil and an O on the other. After plugging both your fan and the light socket into your power strip and setting the thermometer and a cup of water inside the guinea incubator, you should be good to go. (I did that by duct taping the wires to the wall just above the fan.)įinally, you’ll need to put together your light socket, following the instructions that came with it, and cut a hole in the lid of the cooler just large enough to insert that socket snugly-with the bulb on the inside of the box and the switch on the outside. You’ll also want to punch a couple small (pencil-diameter) ventilation holes in each of the remaining three sides of the incubator and attach your computer fan to one of the inside walls, with its wires running over the top of that wall to the outside. Use the utility knife to cut a window in the front of the cooler, slightly smaller than your pane of glass, and the super glue to affix the pane over that opening. Those guineas have been my best behaved ones, so maybe that initial refrigeration helped them keep their cool! Making a Guinea Incubator from Scratch You should opt for eggs that haven’t been chilled if you can, though I suspect the ones I purchased locally had seen the inside of a fridge and half of them still hatched. And, for the third, I used a pile of eggs our guineas had laid themselves-about one and a half dozen that time. For the second, I bought a dozen from a local seller. For my first incubation, I purchased two dozen on E-bay from a farm in Texas. You also will require a utility knife and super glue, the type of light socket kit that is used to make homemade lamps, a 6 by 8-inch pane of glass for a window, a power strip, a cup of water to provide humidity inside the cooler, and the aforementioned computer fan which has been converted so it can be plugged into your power strip. That sort of bulb can be hard to find these days, but it must give off heat, which fluorescents and LEDs won’t. Second, slightly grubby, homemade incubator after a hatch. A 15-watt incandescent aquarium bulb generally can keep this size cooler at about the right temperature of 99 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. In addition to a large easy-to-read thermometer, you’ll require a lidded Styrofoam cooler which is about 14 1/2 by 12 inches at the top, 12 inches tall, and tapering to 12 1/2 by 10 inches at the base. So I decided my more hands-on method might have its advantages after all. I had heard, from people who had used “real” incubators, that those sometimes produced no hatch at all. Despite my discovering how much attention this type of incubation requires, I continued to use the homemade set-up for my later two tries as well. So, if you, too, choose to use a homemade guinea incubator, you will be most successful if you have family members who are willing to help. She also was there to turn the eggs and keep an eye on the temperature whenever I had to be away. It was she who figured out how to convert a computer fan, so that it could be attached to the inside of the cooler. My success at hatching 20 out of 24 eggs probably can be attributed to my elderly mother still being on hand back then.
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