To wash or not to wash?

 Today I seemed to be mostly collecting fertile eggs.

In the morning 30% and I headed over to Stratford-upon-Avon and whizzed around the supermarket before heading across town and on to Snitterfield.  Our destination was the Domestic Fowl Trust, where we were supposed to collect twenty Crested Cream Legbar hatching eggs.

Unfortunately, the laying birds had not read the order properly and there were only fifteen eggs available ... and many of those were pretty grubby. The chap at the Trust was very decent about this and halved the price of the eggs. He also threw in a good few kilos of medicated chick crumb, so it would be churlish to be anything other than complimentary. 

As we headed home I pointed out that we would have five spare spots in our incubator and we might as well try to fill them.  The man at the Trust had mentioned Newland Poultry over towards Malvern, so I gave them a call.

It is getting towards the end of the poultry breeding season as the parent birds will soon start their moult, but Newland Poutry managed to scrape together half a dozen "Olive Eggers" for me to pick up later in the day. Olive Eggers are a cross breed from Marans and Crested Cream Legbar parent birds. They will, as the name suggests, lay olive green eggs once they mature.

Having collected the eggs, I left them to settle overnight, planning to start the incubation tomorrow. However, as mentioned earlier, the Legbar eggs were pretty dirty and, obviously, the incubator is the perfect environment for bacteria to grow. Should I wash the eggs, or not?

An internet search followed and left me none the wiser. Some sources state that washing the eggs in a proprietary egg disinfectant solution is the way forward. Others say that it damages the egg's protective cuticle and is the action of a madman.*

In the end I decided that the eggs would be washed before incubation. It'll be interesting to see how thing pan out in twenty one or two days time.

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* Many years ago I recall collecting a Minorca egg from a very muddy run. The egg was literally plastered with mud and other chicken run filth. I clearly remember that I incubated the egg and it hatched successfully, and I am pretty certain that I would have washed it first.