I just can't seem to stop making charts. This one is my attempt to link high and low temperatures each day to egg production. There is a flaw in the data in that I know that it takes 15 hours of daylight exposure for a hen to lay an egg. Pests, cleanliness of the nest box, the number of roosters, and anything out of the hen's routine, like a varmint attack, moving the coop, or a change in feed, will affect production. But, assuming that everything is normal in the life of our hens and understanding that less sunlight in the winter also coincides with lower temperatures I think I can make the link to higher temps = more eggs. So other than all the unaccounted for variables in this equation, the data is still good.
(I sound like an elected government official commenting on the state of the economy!)
The chart indicates that drastic drops in temperatures like what we had on February 10 this year resulted in a drastic drop in egg production. My scientific explanation for this is the hen when squatting down in the nesting box, frozen from low temperatures, experienced what we in the scientific egg production community call "a butt-pucker". This phenomena resulted in a constipated "channel" resulting in no egg.
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