Rollaway nest box blues

[Icemaiden]

Advice needed please...

I bought some rollaway nest box inserts from Wells Poultry to try to stop my hens from egg-eating. This necessitated building a new, deeper nestbox, so that when the inserts were installed such that the rim was horizontal (so that the bottom sloped), there was enough head room for the girls & also enough room for the eggs to roll away out of reach.

After all this hard work, the old girls figured that laying their eggs (all soft-shelled now anyway) in the coop rather than in the nestbox inserts made them easier to eat 10 but my new girls, two of whom are now laying, are following their example too & laying in the coop rather than the nestbox. There's a dummy egg propped up in one of the nestbox inserts to give them a clue, & I've physically put both of the young layers into the nestbox too, but they still won't lay there. I'm wondering whether it's just that they'd rather lay on a comfortable layer of aubiose than on a sloping piece of plastic? (I can see their point...)

Can anyone think of how I can get them laying in the right place? They're already learning to eat the older girls' soft eggs; I don't want them starting to eat the hard shelled ones. 09

 

[darkbrowneggs]

Try putting some nice tempting soft bedding material in there with the egg positioned nicely, and maybe hang a bit of towelling or something similar partly over the nest box opening to darken it slightly. Once they are laying in there happily you can gradually remove the nest material so the roll away works.

Also you can try upping the protein your birds are getting in case its a dietary issue. Plus a smidgin of codliver oil with the feed helps them absorb calcuim to make the egg shells.

 

[Marigold]

If you've given up on trying to teach the older girls to lay in the nestboxes, why not remove the rollaways and just give the younger ones the choice of some nice comfortable, well- bedded ordinary ones?
Or maybe do something like the flower-pots-in-nestboxes trick in reverse, and block off the area of coop floor where they all lay during the day, so they have to go in the boxes to lay?

 

[Icemaiden]

Hmm. Maybe I'll try both of the above suggestions at the same time? I might also pin up the "curtain" between the nestbox & the rest of the coop too, until they get the idea...

 

[Marigold]

The origin of the problem is on the nature of your flock at present, isn't it? You really don't want the young ones learning what's inside any eggs, or you will have a problem they will hand on in turn when you get more newbies in a year or two.
Any chance of keeping the two batches separate, at least during the day, so the young ones get the coop and nestboxes to learn to lay in, and the exbatts get a second coop, or even just a comfortable box with no perches but nice and dark?