Remember how you can tell if
an egg is too old to eat with a float test?  You can use a similar test on day 23 or 24 with eggs that haven’t hatched to make sure the chicks inside are really dead.

The first step is to wait until most of your eggs have hatched.  I like to wait 24 hours after the last chick comes out of the shell, then take a close look at the remaining eggs to make sure none of them has pipped or been cracked.  (You don’t want to do a float test on a pipped egg or the chick will drown.)  This test is mildly traumatic to a chick inside an unpipped egg, so there’s no reason to risk it until you’re getting ready to toss the unhatched eggs.

Now fill a container with water that’s roughly baby bottle temperature — warm enough that you
can barely feel it when touched to the underside of your wrist.  (This is the same temperature water you use when proofing yeast for bread, about 100 degrees Fahrenheit.)  Wait until the water has stopped moving in the container, then take an egg out of the incubator and carefully lower it into the water with a spoon.

If your egg sinks to the bottom, it was probably infertile from the beginning and is definitely
a dud now.  If it floats, take a careful look at the floating pattern.

Does the big end stick up above the water with the narrow end pointing straight down?  Your egg is probably a “yolker” that either was a dud from the beginning or died young.

On the other hand, if your egg floats at more of an angle, almost horizontally, the chick might be alive inside.  (The chick is definitely still alive if the egg starts to move around on its own.)  Carefully take the egg out of the water, wipe it dry, and pop it back in the incubator for another day or two.

In the past, I’ve been guilty of pulling late hatchers out of the incubator prematurely, but with this float test in my arsenal, I suspect my hatch rate will continue to rise.

Chickens
can be very destructive in the garden, but if you’re more careful, you
can take advantage of their busy feet and beaks to improve your garden
ecosystem.  A timely application of chickens to the orchard can
kill pest insects without chemicals. 



Plum curculio, codling
moth, and oriental
fruit moth are all
orchard pests that have been successfully controlled with
chickens.   These insects overwinter in debris under your
fruit trees, emerging as adults between the time peaches bloom and
apples reach the pink stage (for plum curculio and oriental fruit moth)
and when the last petals
fall from the apple blossoms (for codling moth).  If you allow
chickens to scratch around under your fruit trees in early spring
before the adult insects emerge, your flock will eat a large number of
the overwintering insects and cut back on damage to your fruit trees.



If you’ve waited too
long and the adult insects have already emerged, you can still get some
benefit from chickens in the orchard.  Plum curculio is a type of
small beetle that tends to be slow-moving on chilly mornings. 
Head into the orchard and jar the trunks of your trees several times
soon after dawn and the beetles should fall to the ground and into your
hungry chicken beaks.



Another useful time to
let chickens into your orchard occurs as fruits begin to drop from the
tree.  While the good fruits are still hanging on the branches but
pest-ridden fruits are falling to the ground, you can turn chickens (or
other livestock) into the orchard to clean up dropped fruits and lower
insect pressure for next year.  It’s also handy to let your chickens eat any rotten
fruits after you’ve harvested, since these fallen fruits sometimes
harbor diseases as well as pests.



You won’t want to run
your chickens in the orchard 365 days a year since the flock might
overdo their scratching and will likely overfertilize your trees. 
I located our outdoor
brooder close to our
oldest peach tree so that our first batch of broilers can scratch
through the mulch, figuring that these three week old birds will work
the ground up in the two weeks left before they get moved to the main
coop.  If all goes as planned, I’ll let our second batch of
broilers visit our next biggest peach tree for a few weeks as
well.  We’ve had serious problems with oriental fruit moths in the
past and are hopeful that chicken feet will mitigate some of the damage.