Question Yet another feather colours question!!!

[Skinny rooster]

A month! That is a bummer when in pain. Well so I better start writing down my ten thousand questions for you before then. Like I just read that you can breed RIR hens to a Rhodebar rooster and the chicks will still be sex linked? And they said to breed those daughters back to a Rhodebar rooster and the chicks will be pure? Is that true?

There's an old quote I like from Canada's first Prime minister John A MacDonald that goes "one can never be too sure about the accuracy of information one gets from the internet".

Lol

[WLLady]

In order in inject "new blood" into the rhodebar lines we do breed back to RIR hens.

RIR hen x Rhodebar rooster = all barred kids (not sex linked)-not sure where they think this cross will be sex linked, because everyone is gold based....and everyone gets 1 copy of the barring gene at least so everyone is barred-all with have a head spot because everyone has one copy of barring gene.**
then cross HENS back to rhodebar dad= you get rhodebars back. boys are double barred (lighter) and girls are single barred (darker) and everyone has head dot, but males have much bigger well defined head dot, and are sexable at hatch.

**You need to get rid of all the boys from the chicks from the rir x rhodebar breeding because they will not carry 2 copies of the barring gene and if you use them over rhodebar girls you will get some not barred kids...

[Skinny rooster]

Ok that makes sense. I never heard of Rhodebars until last year. I think the breed developers made a huge mistake in not giving them their own name. Many people (including me for a time) think they are just a hybrid and not an actual breed, that's too bad really. I was also reading about Welbars last week (which I think you have). What I got from that was many people saying that Welsummers are not good layers (Welsummer owners were saying this, not me) and so they also keep Welbars. I like the look of the Welbar hen but I prefer the look of the Welsummer rooster. I am going to assume if you use a Welsummer rooster over Welbar hens there is no sex link happening?

[WLLady]

they were named rhodebars after the parent lines-they are derived from Rhode Island Red and Barred Rocks...hence Rhodebar. Same with the welbar-welsummers crossed with barred rocks. then bred til they breed true....
i have both types of welbars, silver welbar and gold welbars. They are both beautiful birds, the gold welbar girls actually look a lot like barnevelders! i absolutely love the silver welbar boys-they look almost like birchen boys...but aren't. i'm still working on the boys, i have too much silver in the chest/breast area, they should be fairly dark....sigh. the gold welbar boys are just welsummer boys with barring. I think they're really quite nice too.

so welsummer x welbar IS a sex linked with respect to barring. all the boys will be barred, the girls will not. but only for that one generation.

girls can only carry 1 copy of barring because they are zw. boys can carry 2 because they are zz. z is the name of the chromosome....so in people men are XY and women are XX...it's opposite in chickens-girls are zw and boys are zz. (only called z and w because of the shape of the chromosome under the microscope). So the barring gene is on the z chromosome when it is present. so if a barred hen (zw is barred, her z carries the gene). if a boy is barred he could have one copy or two of the barring. if he has 2 copies (one on each z) then he tends to be much lighter (more barring) than a boy with one copy. both are barred. if a barred hen (zw) is crossed with an unbarred male (zz)....for simplicity i'm going to name the barred z chromosome B for now), the hen is Bw. the male has no B...so zz. cross them and you get Bz, Bz, wz and wz. so we know that zw (or wz) is a pullet...so those are girls. the B is essentially z with the barring gene, so Bz are boys. and B is barred so they're barred. and that's sex linked barring....LOL

in reality we would write barred girls as Bb (B for the barring positive on the z, and b for the non barred w) and the unbarred boys are bb (no barring gene on either of the zs) so Bb x bb gives Bb, Bb, bb and bb. then we have to remember that the B is on a hen, so the b from the BB is really the w, meaning the bb are girls....

clear as mud?

My welsummers are fine layers, as are my welbars and rhodebars....hm. of course when they aren't moulting! maybe it's just their lines? no clue. but i love my welsummers, welbars and rhodebars....my RIR boy is a jerk....lol. the hens are nice though. I'm not quite ready to sell the welbars and rhodebars though, still selecting on the boys. the girls are looking pretty good though.
Here is a silver welbar boy (left) and a rhodebar boy (right).

upside down for some reason LOL both were culls - silver welbar had some red coming through in hackles and that white in his tail was too much, but you get the idea.

These are my gold welbars-i have another generation after this, but these are the last ones i
have photos of so far.....

and a silver welbar girl....i love this colour....

and a couple younger silver welbars here...the front boy is a cull too much white. but the back boy is not bad, and the girls are coming along nicely.

[Happy]

Oh my! I'm in love!!!
They are gorgeous. How many birds do you have all together @WLLady ?

[WLLady]

All my lines i think about 50 or so. I have several different breeds and lines of each breed....and 7 turkeys lol.
Just rhodebar and welbars maybe 17 or so...

[windwalkingwolf]

What makes a hen a good layer isn't the breed, but the breeding. All chicken breeds have common ancestry, Junglefowl, and even hatchery bred Junglefowl are REALLY crappy layers. In any breed, decent layers bred to sons of decent layers will produce decent layers more consistently. Purebred anything tend to be mediocre layers because breeders tend to breed for looks...to focus on improving egg production as well would take more birds, more culling, more money, more frequent introduction of new blood to keep fertility high, more time...so unfortunately in many many lines of breeds, egg production got left in the dust. There isn't any reason a flock of crappy laying Welsummer can't become a good laying flock, take heart! :-D
WLLady, love your silvers!

[Skinny rooster]

I LOVE your birds!!! I really enjoyed looking at these photos, thank you WLLady. So there was a little bit of smoke coming out of My ears when reading about zz Bz wz but I got it, that's so interesting, I wish I knew about this years ago. So you are saying that if I get welbar hens and breed them Welsummer rooster, I still will have sex-link chicks? Are you also saying that you found your Welsummer hens are as good as or close to your Welbar hens?

When I was breeding black sex-link chickens, every now and then one of the roosters would look like your silver welbar roosters.

Finally regarding the names, example Rhodebar, see that is why I feel the breed should have its own name, people think it's just rir mixed with barred rock. Like Chantecler sounds way cooler than whitewyndottecornishleghornrock! See my point lol. :)

[WLLady]

i do believe that rhodebars and welbars originally were bred somewhere in the UK.....i'm a little rusty on the history of them. I know there's only really 1 bloodline of each in north america which is why i decided to breed my own. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) i chose to make my rhodebar line on the heritage mahogany rhode island red background-which means mine are on Ewh/Ewh, while the american bloodlines are based on production RIRs that are e+/e+ background. There are some Ewh/Ewh rhodebars in the UK. but i have kind of limited the breeding potential of my birds by going with the Ewh heritage RIR lines in the beginning. Since i don't even have production reds i might in the future make another line of production e+/e+ based rhodebars...so they're at least sellable and supplementing the north american lines, but i really don't like the production red, the heritage mahogany gives a much much nicer rooster i think.
yes, my welbars are as good as my welsummers, and my welsummers are one of my better layers. I'd say first my barred rocks, then my welsummers/welbars/rhodebars/rhode island red lines....then the ameraucanas and the marans are the bottom of the pack for laying. my barred rocks usually lay well through the winter, while some of the welsummers and welbars do too.

Yes, you should be able to get sex linked with the barring gene on welsummer boy over welbar girls. just be aware that you will need a couple of generations to remake a pure welbar boy and a pure welbar girl from that mix....the boys will all be single barred, while the girls will not. but the offspring will look like welsummers, not black girls and brown boys! because the sex linking is JUST the barring gene. not the down gold/silver sex linking. so you can tell the offspring by the head dot. down colour will be virtually the same between boys and girls.