is it ok to gather eggs in the afternoon?
question about eggs
we gather eggs 2-5 times daily. i guess you mean you are leaving the ggs out all day? so hopefully your henhouse is not too hot or cold... and you don't have egg predators or hens that might get naughty and eat them.
sometimes leaving the eggs a little while encourages them to all lay together, which is really helpful if htey are free ranging. but i still don't like to leave them long. i am usually here, and by going out regularly i can see what, if anything, might be wrong...
if the eggs got too hot, just feed them to your kitties...
well i can't get to my eggs till the afternoon because i work i didnt know if the heat of the afternoon will cause them to spoil and make us sick or not.
We usually pick them all up in the evening. Last week one day we came home and my son found a snake in one of the lower nests. My daughter said there were 6 eggs in it earlier that day and with the snake in the nest there were only 2 left. He had quite a good last meal.
We usually gather ours 1-3 times a day, depending on how hot or cold it is. I know the longer they stay warm, the more nutritional value you lose, but I don't know where the line is for when they will go bad. We sell our eggs for eating, so when in doubt I throw it out. Well, I scramble them and give them to the dogs. Wish I could be more help!
We gather our once or twice a day. Our girls don't usually lay too early in the day, so if we go up about 2:00 or 2:30 in the afternoon, we get our first eggs and then when we let them out to free range, we get the second clutch of them.
GG
why don't you put a thermometer in the coop , one of htose digital ones that recoreds the temps. then you will know if it is staying cool. maybe you can take steps to regulating the temps in there, so you can continue to get eggs throughout the summer.
i have a chart somewhere that shows how the temps affect the blastoderm. that has more to do with hatchability. but mistymeadows [kathy] could tell you at what point the eggs are not safe...
tf