The first step when you want to make a success of incubation hatching is actually to prepare a place for the young chicks beforehand. Young chickens can be extremely susceptible to a large number of possible ailments, and if you don’t house them correctly once they hatch, their mortality rate can become unacceptably high. Remember the goal here is not merely to hatch the chicks, but to have as many of them as possible survive. There is no point in hatching a large number of chicks unless you have the facilities to house them and to ensure that a decent majority of them actually survive. Once you have your housing facilities ready, you can then go on to the task of hatching out the young chicks.

Remember that you’ll need to do a trial run or two with your incubator before you start actual incubation hatching. There’s no need to put any eggs in it at this stage. Eggs are highly susceptible to hatching conditions, so at this stage, you should be more interested in seeing whether you can maintain a stable range in temperature in your incubator over a period of a day or two at the very minimum.

Once you’re perfectly satisfied that you’ve positioned the incubator correctly, and that it will provide stable hatching conditions for the eggs, it’s time to take things to the next level, and to actually place your first lot of eggs inside the device. You’ll find, if your monitoring temperatures inside the incubator, that there will be a drop of temperature within the device immediately after the eggs are put in. It may be your first instinct to reach for the temperature controls on the device, but you must not do so under any circumstances.

Temperatures have fallen within the incubator as the eggs absorb heat energy in the first stage of hatching. This is perfectly natural, and if you turn up the temperature on your incubator, it will just result in your eggs becoming overheated. This will interfere with the natural hatching process, and might even result in you losing your stock of eggs. Temperatures should stabilize within two days of putting your eggs in, and must be maintained from that point on. After this, incubate the eggs for about three weeks, and the young chicks should begin hatching at about that point. As you can see, incubation hatching is not a complex process at all.