Chicken Myths Busted

Since having chickens, I have learned that people have a lot of misconceptions about them. Here are a few:

• Chickens have to have a rooster around to lay eggs. (No...only if you want fertilized eggs. Hens will lay eggs, regardless. They will just never hatch any chicks.)
• Chickens lay multiple eggs a day. (No, laying an egg is a lot of work for a chicken. They lay an average of 5-6 eggs a week. Did you know that according to my reading, at any given time a chicken has multiple eggs in various stages of development in the chute? Interesting.)
• All chickens lay brown eggs. The ones you buy at the store are bleached. (No...it varies by breed)
• All chickens lay white eggs. The brown ones are dyed. (Yes, I wake up every morning and carefully dye each egg to an individual shade of brown or blue. Not!)
• Chickens lay one egg a week. (see above)
• And one of my favorites....do you actually eat the eggs? Um, yes. They are eggs and they just so happened to be way more fresh than the ones you buy in the store. There is a lot less potential for contamination when they go straight from the nest box to the fridge. (P.S. Did you know that eggs are coated in 'bloom' which naturally protects them from bacteria entering the porous shell? Eggs can actually stay fresh without refrigeration because of the bloom, and apparently in Europe they don't even refrigerate their eggs. In the U.S., they scrub the bloom off and coat the eggs with some sort of oil or wax to replace the bloom.)