Rural Gardening: Molting?, 0 by Loon

Loon wrote:
Update...............well we have more babies. We have 9 so far. One more egg to hatch. We put mama in the smaller enclosed coop with the babies and put the one unhatched egg in there with her as well. If it doesn't hatch by tomorrow we'll toss it as it might not be fertilized. This coop was built to hold 8 mature hens so it's plenty big enough for mama and babies for a while.

When we decide to open the door and let her lead her babies out of there how do we keep feeding them the chicken starter food and keep the other birds from eating their food? Will it hurt to keep the red heat lamp on in there anyway? I don't mind leaving it on unless you think it might make mama too hot. We could swap it out for a regular lightbulb.

I read somewhere that if you have two broody hens sitting too close to each other one will sabotage the other's eggs by breaking them so that may be what happened to Whitey's eggs. Poor thing. She is still sitting on an empty nest. I don't know what to do with her. We keep throwing her off but she keeps getting back on. How do you get her to give up?

I'll post a pic we took this morning.