I don't see why not. The yolk is just the nutrients absorbed in the final days. That is the reason they can do without food for three days. I guess there is a chance there would be two ovum along with the yolks.
 
Very, very rarely. There isn't usually room for development and proper position. I hatch out 100's of eggs a year.
 
That is a yes no or maybe and if it does you could end up with a 2 headed bird or some such odd thing
 
Yes, I have seen the results - not pretty (two heads or several legs, etc.). More often than not, the egg doesn"t hatch and I never did see any survive over a day or so.

Years ago, we had a couple of chickens that would lay double-egged yolks about once every two weeks. Occasionally, one of them would lay a three-yolk egg. Our mother would never allow us to try and hatch either the two or the three-yolked ones. She said that was a cruel thing to do even something as dumb as a chicken.
 
99.9% of the time they won't hatch--not enough room in the shell for two embryos to develop. I worked 27 years as a commercial broiler hatchery manager and we never set double yolks. As far as the two heads, four legs, etc., I respectfully disagree with those who say they come from double yolks. They are just abnormal. We routinely broke out unhatched eggs once a month to see why they didn't hatch and the few double yolks that were set would often have two embryos in them that died about 16-18 days of incubation. Based on having hatched millions of chicks, this is my opinion.
 
Billy C.

I can"t respectfully disagree on your assessment of the source of the malformities. The four-legged chick was from a farm close to us. It didn"t actually hatch out, but was discovered when their son opened up all the unhatched eggs (as he did every time they set eggs).

That young lad was also the source of information about the two-headed chick, which he described as actually more like having an extra beak growing out of the head. That one I didn"t get to see because he said it was too gross for him to handle. He blamed both on setting double-yolked eggs, but that information might have been his after-the-fact observation.

As said previously, we were not allowed knowingly to use double-yolked eggs for setting and the double and triple-yolked eggs we occasionally would get were so large that it was obvious they were not normal eggs.
 

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