Do chickens ever stop laying eggs?
That would depend on when their life ends. Commercially, egg production birds at most may live two years. After that egg production drops, so they process the hens, and bring in a new batch of layers. As for how long a hen can lay, that depends on the breed, strain (whom breed the bird, and what they were working towards), and how the bird is housed. I have hens of seven years in the nest every other day, when the weather is nice. My oldest laying bird was eight, but I am sure there has been older. (chickens can live into their teens, one of my roosters is fourteen and I am still hatching out chicks from him.) Fertility can’t really be determined without some development. When candling you need around seven days to begin to see the embryo and veining. After a day or so, sometimes with eggs I have just collected one can ere a bullseye, a white dot in the center of the yolk, which means the egg is fertile. However, this can’t always be seen. Standardly if one has one rooster for every tw
