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red wrote:my girls were sold as POL - 18 weeks old.. however, I'm not sure they how accurate this is... the buff leghorn looks young to me, the cream legbar older.. we have had them two weeks... so still early days yet.

Red - a good test for point of lay is to cradle a bird under your arm with it facing behind you. You can then feel just above the vent (where the egg emerges from) - there should be two knuckle like bones. if you can fit two fingers between the bones, then the hen should be at POL - if the gap is too narrow, then so is the egg passage.

I also light my hen house during the winter. If your's were to come into lay, I would be tempted to put a low energy light bulb on a 24 hour timer in the henhouse. Set it so the hens get 15 hours of daylight and 9 hours of darkness. I set a reminder to adjust the timer at the beginning of each month to suit the reducing/increasing day length. I am not sure if you could induce laying on a later POL bird by lighting the house after the day length reduces past 15 hours though.

This time last year I had 32 Black Rocks, none of which were laying (one batch just approaching POL and another had been rescued from an organic farm that felt the birds were not productive enough). They were hoovering up a 20kg bag of feed every 2 or three days. Cost a bloody fortune to feed them from October to March and not a single egg to sell to cover the costs. Get a light in!

Does it matter what sort of light they have? My hen house has a flourescent light already installed. I sometimes leave it on in the evening for an hour or so but when I go up to switch it off the girls have already hopped onto the perch and gone to sleep. It doesn't seem to matter that the light is on.

Zoe

Any sort of light - it dos not have to be very light. I cant remember how light, but I had an 11W energy saving lamp in my 6*8 henhouse and I think it might just have been too dark.

It's the action of the light hitting th birds head (even when she's sleeping) that triggers the hormonal action.

You can buy commercial ones here but I just can't justify the cost!

Ooooh - thanks for reminding me. The light's still on. Even the chooks are allowed some proper sleep.

Cheers - back in a mo (toddles of up the garden to switch the light off)

Zoe

the light requirement isn't that high - if I remember right, in a big 1,000 -bird free range deep litter shed we had 4x60 watt bulbs (nowadays that'd be 4x12w energy savers)
Before we did it on a large scale, I also managed to light a small henhouse using a paraffin lantern (very carefully mounted, with a "chimney" to outside to save gassing the birds) - I'd go and light it around twilight, and toddled back out to blow it out at 10 every evening!
One of these - about £2!

Thanks, guys.

I think I'll stick with my small flourescent tube. I could possibly wire in a timer for when I'm back at work. Anonther job to add to my list.

Zoe