A. Most breeds will start to lay at 5-8 months of age. If not you can check several things; you need to feed them chick starter up to the point they start laying, it has everything they need, then switch them over to “egg pellets or crumble.” Maybe throw a hand full of scratch a day for a treat and make them scratch for exercise. Stay away from corn, there is already the right amount of corn in the egg pellets. There is not enough nutrition within corn to keep chickens healthy. Make sure the chickens are not sick, lightweight, pale-faced, wormy, lice and mite-infested. Make sure the hens get some sunlight and some fresh air each day. Make sure they have dry ground, windbreaks and a place to roost at night. Hens need full water and feed available all day to produce eggs. If it is fall, winter or early spring you can put one light on the birds at night with an automatic timer to turn on at 5:00 a.m. and go off at 10:00 a.m. Do not keep the light on all night, it will stress the birds and they will pick feathers, stress and get sick. Have their nest in the darker area of the coop so the hens feel good about laying in the nest. Make sure the hens are not too crowded in the pen or coop and if you have roosters with the hens don’t have more than 1 rooster to every 10 hens. Sometimes the hens are laying, except you may have a black snake eating your eggs. Also, you may have a hen that is eating eggs and the shell. If you think this is happening watch for hens pecking at eggs. If you find one hen that you suspect, put her up and see if your egg numbers increase. Once a hen starts to eat eggs you very seldom can break her and it is best to get rid of her. She will also teach the other hens to break eggs and it is best to get rid of her. Generally, a 7-month-old pullet will start to sing, comb turn red and the vent bones become more spread apart for egg production. For a standard size pullet, 2 ½ or 3 fingers width placement between the 2 bones on the side of the vent will mean she is laying or will soon be laying. If it is 1-2 width figures then she is not laying.

A. Most hens stop laying in winter, not because the weather turns cold, but because reproduction is sensitive to light exposure, and daylight hours are shorter in winter than in summer. When the number of daylight hours falls below 14, hens may stop laying until spring.

A.  In general eggshell tint will change throughout each hen’s laying cycle and go from darker tint to lighter tint. However, the most noticeable lighter tint change is generally due to a lack of Vitamin K in the hen’s diet. Add Vitamin K to the hen’s diet to darken up the natural shell tint. You will usually see results in 7 days.