How Long can I wait

I keep eggs that I may incubate in the utility room (between kitchen and garage), no heating, in an ordinary egg box, seems to work well, I'm sure people in the know have a much more sophisticated system, but this is all I have.
Five or six days seems OK, i.e. just kept some ebay Legbar eggs after posting, to incubate with my Croad eggs, as I wanted to do just one incubator lot, so ebay Legbar eggs are quite a few days old, and all six Legbar eggs are fertile and incubating at the moment.
 
Ebay eggs laid, then in post to me, then kept 3 days at least, so from laying to incubator I would say at least 7/8 days. I have some at the moment from my Pekins that will not go on for another 3 days, and some of them are already several days old. Will post how they get on.
 
The main problem you have Jllvehdist is that you don't know exactly how old the eggs are from the breeder, but we aim to incubate eggs no older than 7 days. After that the hatch rate falls away and anything older than 10 days isn't worth hatching. I have heard people say they have had good hatch rates from eggs older than that, but it didn't work for us. I think storage and handling conditions become very important if you aim to hatch from eggs older than 7 days. We keep ours on egg trays, date marked with HB pencil, in a cool place. Aiming for 12 degrees and 80% humidity but that isn't always possible- in the UK we had a cellar which kept those conditions all year.
 
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