Shame about the girls. Good luck with trying to hatch the eggs. We tried with the quails eggs about 20 years ago but never had any luck. We also tried with pythons eggs (!) and things were going perfectly until my daughter had some friends round and one of them in a drunken stupor pee'd on them
I've been lent an automatic incubator by a friend who gave me 1/2 my flock back in February. The surviving bird which I am tending to is originally hers and was the very first bird they ever hatched themselves. The incubator deals with everything including rotating the eggs, but it is a very cheap one, so I need to keep an eye on it. Basically I do nothing much for the first 18 days (I alter the temp on day 7 and day 14 and then on Day 18 make some changes like taking the eggs out of the rotator and increasing the humidity by adding water to the 2nd area, putting a towel in there for the chicks to have something to grip on and wait. Its a plug it in and forget about it job almost! We've put all the eggs we had available in it that were viable. Luckily because we had the possibility of one of my girls being broody n(or going that way) we had actually been saving eggs for her to sit on if she did... so now they are in the incubator plus the eggs the girls laid on the day! Even if we only get 2 pullets from it, at least we will have tried and that will make us both feel much better about it.Shame about the girls. Good luck with trying to hatch the eggs. We tried with the quails eggs about 20 years ago but never had any luck. We also tried with pythons eggs (!) and things were going perfectly until my daughter had some friends round and one of them in a drunken stupor pee'd on them