Hey, I have been looking for different colors of eggs. I know of someone who has what looks like really pink eggs, also some "gray" eggs. The pictures are really good. My question is this, would hens hatched from pink eggs lay pink eggs?
egg colors
It can be hard to reproduce colours accurately in pictures. "Pink" eggs are really a light brown or pinkish "tinted". A pullet that hatches from a "pink" egg probably has the genes to lay a pink egg from her mother...but she may have other genes from her father that could turn her eggs dark brown, teal or some other colour. If the father and mother are closely related/the same breed, the chances would be good that the egg colour would be stable.
I really was wondering myself about that. I know with the Easter Egger chickens there are such a variety of egg colors. So if one wanted pink eggs I am wondering if one should stick to hatching pink eggs. And olive eggs the same. I really like the olive eggs.
Olive-eggers are actually fairly simple to create. All you need is a bird that carries genes for both blue and dark brown eggs....say cross a blue or teal egg laying hen with a rooster from one of the very dark brown egg laying breeds...e.g. a Marans or Penedesenca. The pullets that hatch from that cross should be olive eggers.
The reason this works is that unlike the other colour pigments which are only superficial overlays on the egg (you can scratch them off and see the white egg shell underneath), the pigment that the blue gene codes for goes all through the shell (which makes it very hard to candle). If you scratch an olive coloured egg, you should be able to see the blue shell underneath.
Hey, that is an interesting fact and I didn't realise the olive eggs came about that way. I did read about some of the darker brown breeds having the color last on the outside just as you said but now I can't remember which all breeds it said it was. The blue Ameraucana goes all the way thru?
But now the way you describe it what about the olive eggs breeding more olive egger layers? Doesn't sound like it breads true.
Breeding two olive eggers together could give more olive eggers or brown eggers or blue eggers. Most likely some of each. If it is strictly Mendelian, you would get one fourth blue, one fourth brown, and half olive eggers. (Spell check hates the word eggers - whee! :) )
Ok, you guys are looking at it from the breeders point of view. Maybe I am just not getting this but I am looking at it from the point of view of buying hatching eggs. I see ones offered on e-bay that are really olive or so the seller saiz. Now I would love to have the hen(s) that lay the deep olive eggs. So I buy the deep olive eggs, hatch them, get hens (pretend they are all hens as roosters would be in the stew pot). I think you are saying I just as well could get any other color as I could get olive eggers. So my plan to get olive eggers is not going to work as I had thought.
Right.
It could...ZZ bought olive egger eggs from a breeder on eBay (I think)....and they did lay olive eggs. They were Ameraucana/Marans crosses, I think.
Anyway, if both parents are homozygous for dark brown and blue pigment (this is a little tricky since there can be multiple genes involved in brown eggs) then you should get a pretty stable olive-egging population. It would work because they are independenly acting genes and not alleles.
So you could start with a Mother who was dark brown/dark brown and blue/blue and cross her with a Rooster who was also dark brown/dark brown and blue/blue. Then all the chicks would be dark brown/dark brown AND blue/blue....i.e. Olive-Eggers.
I think, even if one parent was homozygous for blue/blue and the other for dark brown/dark brown, at least the first filial generation would be blue (and you only need one gene for blue because it is dominant)/? and dark brown/? which would still give you some sort of darker green egg.
I think that is right?
You would need to ask the breeder/egg supplier what the parents were.