Olive Egger Breeding

speckled olive eggs green heavy bloom chicken eggs — Seafoam and olive eggs laid on our homestead in December 2020 by F1 and F2 Olive Egger hens.

Olives are All The Rage!

Olive green eggs – and especially moss colored eggs – have become incredibly popular. The range of earthy tones a hen can lay is fascinating. We have an ongoing 4-H project that is breeding for olive, sage, moss, and khaki eggers in addition to wildly funky speckled eggers of all shades!

This image shows the basic recipe for crossing true blue layers with chocolate layers. But if you want a pistachio green shade like the F1 egg shown, do not use a dark laying Marans rooster! Instead opt for one that hatched from a 4 to 5 shaded egg on the Marans scale. (We used a roo from a shade 4 egg.)

Another goal of our breeding project is to produce olive egger hens in a range of feather colors, including blue, splash and partridge. Our ideal hen will look like a beautifully patterned Easter Egger and lay a heavily speckled egg in unique tones.

HINT: If you would like to reduce your chances of getting a brown or mustard laying khaki egger from the bin of olive eggers, select chicks with pea combs. They are the most likely to be carrying the blue egg gene, which is required to lay an olive egg.

When breeding for olive eggs, you can end up producing an enormous range of colors. It makes for a very fun breeding project!

A ring of Blue Copper Marans, F1 Olive, Spearmint and Whiting True Blue eggs. We mix all of these breeds and more to create various shades of olive laying hens.

Olive eggs are the result of crossing blue egg layers with rare dark brown laying breeds.

If crossed with a speckled dark brown layer, the resulting olive eggs are likely to be speckled, too.

Purebred Welsummer eggs are shown here among speckled olive eggs bred by crossing Whiting True Blue roosters over Welsummer hens. Click the image to learn more about breeding Speckled Olive Eggers!

However the above egg breeding only works if the blue layer is guaranteed to be carrying two copies of the blue egg gene. Since most blue laying birds commonly carry one blue and one recessive white egg gene, the outcome of such a cross is actually this:

Half of the female offspring from this cross will lay olive green eggs and the other half will lay a shade of brown not quite as dark as the dark layer parent.

We use homozygous (carrying 2 copies of each gene) blue and dark egg layers to give us guaranteed olive eggers in the first generation cross:

Knowing our first generation (F1) hens are all olive eggers helps us to begin breeding an enormous range of colors. We can opt to darken the olive shades or increase speckling by breeding olive egger hens to a dark layer roo to create a Back Cross 1.

A purebred Welsummer egg next to speckled olive eggs from a Whiting True Blue roo crossed with Welsummer hens. The two regular olive eggs at the bottom are from crossing a Blue Copper Marans roo (#5-6 shade) with Whiting True Blue hens. Click the image to view more info on the breeding “recipe” we use to create speckled eggs!

Speckled Seafoam Eggs: How It’s Made:

speckled Olive eggs egger breeding seafoam — Speckled seafoam eggs are quite rare but are possible if light-background speckling overlay genes are present. We deliberately breed for speckling overlay genes.

Speckled Seafoam Egg Pictures

speckled seafoam egg unique oive egger egg — This egg is more of a speckled green than the seafoam blue-green we hoped for but the light khaki speckling is present over a colored shell. Laid by one of our hens in September 2020. Speckles seem to be the most prevalent during the autumn months for our flock.

While it is not possible for chickens to produce a speckled true blue egg, you can have light colored speckling over a sea glass blue (lightly green tinged blue) egg like this one laid July 2021.

Speckled Seafoam egg next to a Whiting True Blue egg. The speckled egg is not totally blue. Both eggs laid July 2021. Our speckled seafoam layer only has speckling show up infrequently. Her everyday egg simply has a heavy bloom.

The ever-popular olive egger hen

Olive egger hens are increasingly popular because of her unusual eggs. The avocado-tinted eggs are so prized they are almost never seen, even at farmer’s markets. (Some olive egger hens may only lay about 200 eggs per year, also contributing to their rarity.) The enormous range of tones her offspring could lay often results in most olive eggs laid being used as hatching eggs, not eating eggs.

If a guaranteed olive laying F1 rooster is used, here is what he can produce:

Egg colors are representative of what you can expect but are not exact tones. The lighter green represents shades of Easter Egger green, which can range from light green to sage depending on your flock’s genetics.

I saved the best eggs laid in our Olive Egger pen and took this picture. Our erratic speckled Welsummer, Cinnamon, produces chicks who tend to lay a lighter sage egg with speckling while our normal laying Welsummer, Honker, produces pullets who lay the deeper green speckled olive eggs. The unique Jade Green eggs shown both came from the same Sky Girl Farm pullet (purchased as hatching eggs) and are labeled because they are 100% her breeding work. The two Welsummer eggs shown are from pullets purchased from Hoover’s Hatchery.

Speckled olive eggs (Whiting x Welsummer F1 cross) photographed April 2021. Click the image to read more about this specific hybrid cross.

Speckled eggs photographed February 22, 2022.

How to Breed for Speckles

We’ve had good luck obtaining speckling in F1 offspring by using Welsummers who lay a heavily speckled egg mated to a purebred Whiting True Blue roo. (You can read more about that specific cross here.) Since speckling seems to be most readily inherited from the father, it is best to use a rooster who hatched from a heavily speckled egg himself.

The Speckled Olive Eggs shown here are F1 Whiting x Welsummer crosses. The speckled brown eggs are laid by purebred Welsummer hens from Hoover’s Hatchery. One olive, jade and blue egg are laid by other hens.

Why We Love Welsummer Crosses!

Because Welsummers tend to lay eggs with a terra cotta background color, the olive eggs you get are likely to be medium-olive tones. Back crossing to a very dark chocolate laying Marans can help darken the olive shades.

These Welsummer eggs were all laid by pullets purchased from Hoover’s Hatchery.

Using Multiple Roosters is How Different Shades Are Made

Selecting an Olive Egger roo who hatched from your heaviest speckled eggs and using him to breed the next generation is how some of the most interesting and unusual colors are produced. If you’re serious about your olive egger breeding project it is wise to keep a homozygous blue (two blue egg gene carrying) rooster and a dark chocolate laying rooster so you can back cross as needed to get the colors you are hoping for.