Easter Eggs - Colored by my Chickens.

When I first got involved in chickens I wanted eggs, while searching for the various breeds of chickens I found that by using genetics you can breed different breeds together to achieve various colors of eggs.  After learning this, I wanted eggs of many colors.  Including green.

*Olive Eggs

When I decided to focus on Olive Eggs I decided to go about it using Cream Legbars crossed with Black Copper Marans.

*Sunny, my Cream Legbar Rooster

To create the olive eggs I bought Cream Legbar Hatching Eggs from a friend and incubated the eggs.  The picture above is one of my favorite CLB roosters.  He has long since retired, but I will always have a soft spot for Sunny.  

The process in creating Olive Eggers is to breed a chicken with the genes for blue eggs to a chicken with the genes for dark brown eggs.  Sunny holds the blue egg gene.

*In this picture you can see the dark brown eggs, and the blue eggs.  When the two genes are held in the same chicken, the result is the green eggs.  One will get varied results based on the "shades" of the colors ymixed.

Having obtained the blue egg genes, I now need to add the dark brown egg genes.  

The two ladies on the right are Black Copper Marans hens.  They lay the dark brown eggs.  The gal with the color on her neck is named Source, because she was the source of the dark brown egg genes in my breeding program.

I purchased those hens from friend when they were about a week old.  Once Sunny and Source reached adulthood they were kept in a breeding run together.  

I incubated the fertile dark brown eggs for 21 days before they hatched.   Chicks like all other animals are a bit messy right after they hatch.

*freshly hatched "Olive Eggers, hatched from Source's eggs and fertilized by Sunny.

At this point it was time to wait for Sunny and Source's chick to grow old enough to lay eggs.  Here are some pictures of her along the way.

Hunter is the product of Sunny and Source, pictured above as a pullet and below when she reached maturity.  

HUNTER - The Olive Egg Laying Hen.

Hunter is the result of the cross between Sunny and Source.   She lays beautiful olive colored eggs.  Mission accomplished.

A picture to show the contrast of the colors.  Taken on my counter.

The process of getting olive eggs took 2 years from obtaining the breeding stock, Sunny and Source.  The next step was allowing them both to mature and become ready to breed.  Once I hatched their offspring, I had to wait again for the resulting chick, "Hunter" to reach laying age.  (Around 6 months) Hunter will now be breed back to a Black Copper Marans Rooster to create a darker color in the next generation.  Actually this already happening and I am waiting for Hunter's daughters to begin laying this summer!

Breeding chickens is a fun hobby, as chicken genetics and understanding how their genes work and which are dominate is a pretty interesting hobby.  I consider it a daily science project.