Day 3 of hatching eggs in the incubator

It seems days are going so slow as I’m eagerly waiting for my eggs in the incubator.  It's only day 3.  I have to wait on day 7 before I can start candling it.  I’m so excited but I need to have a lot of patience.  I’ve set the temperature to 37.6 Celcius as suggested by the manual and the humidity to around 55%.  I’ve talked to the vet and she said that it’s perfectly okay to interrupt the incubation process when I need to candle on day 7 because in nature the hen would normally leave its nest to eat.

I have 48 eggs in the incubator and I’ve assigned a unique serial id to each one of them.  The first 2 digits represents the date they were laid and the last digit(s) are the number of eggs laid on that day.  I need to keep a record of everything so I can analyze the results later (i.e. how many made it and to identify what went wrong on those that will fail to hatch).  Under reasonable conditions it is expected a hatch rate of 80 to 85%.  Wish me luck.  This is like a gamble.

On day 3, the embryo should be beginning to take shape and should look like a question mark.  But I'm not opening the incubator yet until day 7.

Marked each egg with a unique id.  I also marked an X at the back so I can keep track the front and the back side of the egg so when I candle it, I can put it back at the right position again.

Put all 48 eggs in the incubator.  I hope most of them are fertilized.  There's no way to identify fertilized egg until it's around day 7 when it's time for candling.

I took this from the book "Hatching & Brooding Your Own Chicks" by Gail Demerow