The Bee Family: Our EGGperiment!

I'm sure you have seen this science experiment pinned before on Pinterest. I know I have at least a dozen friends who have posted the same thing. It's called the Naked Egg Experiment or a Rubber Egg and I've been wanting to try it out for some time now.

Toddler Bee is still a bit too little to get the scientific part of the experiment, but we gave it a try anyway because I wanted to see what would happen.

So, we gathered our supplies and looked at a variety of different links with instructions on how to make a Naked Egg. Everything I was ready said it would take a few days for this trick to work it's magic. So, we put our patience pants on and got to work.

What You Need:

A raw chicken egg

A bowl/jar/container/

White vinegar

And that is it! We used a plastic tupperware container and after the first hour I noticed it had left a ring on the china hutch where I had placed it. Doh! So, a glass jar may be best for this.

Then we made our initial observations. Which were, obviously, an egg in a bowl of vinegar. But almost right away bubbles started to form along the shell.

Bubbles forming along the surface of the egg.

Every so often I would walk by and turn the egg around in the vinegar. I don't think this step is at all important; mostly I was just seeing how much progress our little egg (let us call him Eggbert) was making.

A few sources said that after the first 24 hours you should dump out the old vinegar and replace it. Others said you should keep the egg/vinegar in the fridge. We did neither. We used the same vinegar for the entire experiment and kept it out at room temperature.

After the first hour there was a white foam beginning to form on the surface of the vinegar.

An hour into the eggperiment.

Then, imagine my surprise when we woke up this morning (not even 24 hours since we started our egg-periment) and gave Eggbert a check to find his shell was gone!

Well, not actually gone but when you touched the egg it was soft and squishy and when I rubbed at the shell it started to come off.

The egg this morning.

I left it for another hour or so and then set to work gently and very carefully rubbing the remainder of the shell off.

The egg after I rubbed the remaining shell off.

And we had our naked egg! I kept it in a bowl of plain water for a few hours and then took it out.

It is so cool! It's rubbery and soft but strong enough that we were able to drop it a few inches above the table and watch it bounce. Keeping it in the bowl of water also helped it to get a bit bigger. I've read that if you keep it in a bowl of syrup it will shrivel up, but we haven't tried that.

My husband thinks it's sort of weird but I am absolutely enthralled! And Toddler Bee is just itching to throw the darn thing or make it burst.