How long for guinea fowl eggs to hatch

They like wheat, sorghum, or millet grain and will ignore whole corn kernels. If you are keeping the guineas for pest control, restricting their feed will encourage them to spend more time eating insects. If for any reason guinea fowl are not allowed to forage, they can be fed a commercial poultry diet. It is important to use an unmedicated feed.

Guineas need a higher protein feed than chickens but do quite well on regular poultry diets. If your feed mill does not sell feeds in the proper protein levels, you can mix a higher protein feed with a laying-hen mash to get the proper protein level. Guineas should be fed mash or crumbles. Pelleted feed is not recommended for guineas. You should also provide supplemental greens, such as leafy alfalfa, for the guineas to peck. They will eat the leaves. It is important to remove any leftovers daily to prevent a mold problem.

Guinea fowl are native to Africa, and as such, are very susceptible to dampness during the first two weeks after hatching. The moisture keets encounter when following their mother through dewy grass can kill them.

After those initial two weeks, guineas are widely considered the hardiest of all domestic fowl. Keets can be raised in the same type of brooder houses and brooders as chicks or poults baby turkeys.

Infrared lamps are a convenient, easy-to-use heat source for brooding. Use porcelain sockets approved for these lamps and hang the lamps with chain or wire. Heating lamps should not be hung with the electric cord. Make certain lamps are secured so they cannot fall to the litter and create a fire hazard.

The lamps should hang so that the bottoms are 18 to 24 in. Lamps can be raised or lowered depending on temperature conditions. The use of more than one heat lamp is often recommended, especially during cold weather, so the keets will not be without heat if a bulb burns out.

There are two-bulb units that come with a thermostat that can make it easier to control the temperature in the room. It is important to remember, however, that you are heating the keets and not the air, so measurements of air temperature may not be the best guide when using infrared lamps. If the keets are piling up under the heat source, they are too cold. If they are trying to get as far away from the heat source as possible, the temperature is too hot.

If the keets are evenly dispersed throughout the brooding area, the temperature is just right. After the keets are fully feathered, they are typically able to tolerate extremes in weather fairly well. In the wild, guinea fowl mate in pairs. This tendency also exists among domesticated guineas if there are equal numbers of males and females. As the breeding season approaches, pairs of guineas will wander off in search of hidden nesting sites.

It is not necessary, however, to have equal numbers of females and males to obtain fertile eggs. I happen to love them and have been raising guineas since I started hatching guinea keets as soon as my guinea hens started laying eggs. I also started selling keets that first spring since everyone wanted my newly hatched keets! Thankfully it's easy to incubate guinea eggs so I hatched myself more, and have been hatching them every year since.

When you purchase through links on our site, I may earn an affiliate commission. As an Amazon affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases. And he goes on to say:. She is a very shy bird, and if eggs are taken from her nest with her knowledge, will forsake it altogether, and seek another, which she conceals with the most sedulous care.

A few should therefore always be left, and the nest never be visited when she is in sight. It is best to give the earliest eggs to a common hen, as the Guinea-fowl herself frequently sits too late to rear a brood. If broody in due season, however, she rarely fails to hatch nearly all. Incubation is from twenty-six to twenty-nine or thirty days. The chicks are very strong on their legs, and in fine weather may be allowed to wander with the hen when very young.

Yes, with caveats. This is the pot luck method where the hen sits on her eggs and hatches them out and you hope she doesn't get eaten or get them wet in the grass and kill them by accident.

Below: 3 Guinea hens sat communally on a nest. Communal nesting is a problem when using Guinea hens to brood. If you are raising your Guineas in a coop or enclosed yard and want to encourage the hen indoors, setup a nest and place it in a dark, quiet area of the coop. The ideal nest is not the same as you would use for a chicken, guineas prefer to sit in a hollow in the ground. Thank you for any assistance these will be my first time allowing eggs to hatch.

I would not use a marker because you don't want to possibly poison the eggs with the ink. I use a plain lead pencil.

And I've tried letting a guinea and a chicken raise the keets to disastrous effect. I let the chicken hatch the guineas, putting a few chicken eggs in on about day so the hen won't have done the setting for nothing!

But I take the keets when they are born, because if a keet gets wet out in the grass they usually can't live. Better to be safe than sorry! Kathy Williams said:. Have one keet hatched, another hatching, when can I remove first keet, or should I leave in incubator till other keet is completely hatched?

Should I drop temp when I increase humidity? Jmiller89 said:. Nathaliexx said:. Hi Jmiller89 Only increase humidity, you can leave the temp as is. Increasing humidity will help the keets hatch; the sheet? After that, you can put them in a box or something with a heating lamp. You can set the temp to 37 degrees C while in the incubator. Then, you decrease the temp every 2 weeks with 2 degrees C.

So, after the first 2 weeks in the brooder, you set the temp 33 degrees C, another 2 weeks from then, to 31 degrees C and so on. How are the keets doing? You also turn them at least three times a day?