Does a chicken need to be fertilized by the rooster before laying an egg?
Chickens don’t need roosters to lay an egg, just as female humans don’t need males in order to ovulate. Fertilization is only necessary if you want the eggs to hatch into chicks. This requires a ‘broody’ or ‘clucky’ chicken (that simply wants to be a mother) to sit on her eggs for a period of around 21 days. Are grocery bought eggs fertilized? If you purchase eggs from a store, it is highly unlikely that they are fertilized. Commercial poultry houses do not keep roosters amongst their chickens. If you purchase your eggs from a local farmer who has roosters running with the chickens, it’s possible that the eggs are fertilized. They won’t hatch into chicks however, unless sat on by a chicken (or put in an incubator, especially for this purpose). Fertilized eggs can be eaten because once they’ve been refrigerated, the chicken embryo will not develop. Does the discovery of a red dot in the yolk of an egg mean it was fertilized? A red spot found alongside an egg yolk, is not an indication t
