Candling the Eggs

Today we candled our eggs for the second time. We will do this once more on Friday when we stop turning the eggs in class. Next week is our hatch week so at that point we need to leave the eggs alone to watch what happens! Candling our eggs starts with putting the eggs, one at a time, on the overhead projector, sitting on a piece of cardboard with a hole in the center. We close the shades and turn out the lights in the room, then turn on the projector so we have light focused just on the egg. We slowly rotate the egg over the light and as the light shines through the shell we get a look at what's inside! Today we were able to see promising growth in most of our eggs! We could see a large dark area where the embryo is, the air space at one end of the egg, some egg white, and some veins inside the egg! A few of our eggs looked mainly clear when we candled them, which may mean that the embryo isn't developing. We hope to see more growth when we candle again on Friday and we are hoping that next week we will be able to say "Happy Birthday" to several cute little chicks! Below are some photos of students helping me candle eggs.