Wang Xiaoqiang brought back the forty-six pheasant eggs he had purchased to the Old Village Committee Courtyard, where he added them to the fifty-two pheasant eggs he had already collected; he now had a total of ninety wild mountain eggs.
Normally, not all of these ninety pheasant eggs would hatch into chicks. Wang Xiaoqiang decided to try incubating them first to see how many would hatch, and during this idle period, he would catch some more wild pheasants.
Wang Xiaoqiang's earliest memory involved the villagers incubating chicks using the hen's body heat, but nowadays, chicken farms use incubators.
Using hens for incubation was rather troublesome; one would first need to feed the hen a mixture of cornmeal and wine to make her half-drunk so that she would dutifully sit on the eggs. This method was not very efficient, whereas incubators were much more convenient, and purchasing an incubator was not very expensive either—only around fifty to sixty yuan each.
