Listless Pekin Bantam.....any advice?

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Our Pekin Bantam, Minnie is under the weather. Eating ok but seems to be spending hours in the laying box after she has laid an egg, yesterday even though it was sunny she was in the laying box for 4 hours. All the chickens have a cosy coop and a large run and they also free range in our big garden for most of the day. She seems to be loosing a few, more than usual, feathers from her chest? DS is currently sat here in the kitchen with her on his lap and feeding her vanilla biscuits......Any ideas oh wise ones?

Has she gone a bit broody?

Broody! Defo! Just leave her be! She'll come around in a couple of weeks.

Thank-you for the responses. How would I know she has gone broody other than this solitary mood? We have only had chickens for 18 months and I haven't really noticed any of the others doing it and we have 13 others Do I need to do anything or just let her get on with it?

Broody hens are okay in themselves but spend all day sitting on the box while their friends are out enjoying themselves. Mine often were more grumpy than usual when I went to collect the eggs. I used to just collect the eggs daily and let then get on with it. They go back to normal in a couple of weeks. Some hens are more likely to be broody than others. Just more maternal in nature, I suppose.

If she's broody she'll fluff up her feathers when you try to move her off the nest. They also make a "pwrrrk" sound when you move them.

I rarely bother trying to break the behaviour otherwise I'd have a sin bin full of grumpy chickens. Just chuck her off the nest a couple of times a day so that she eats and drinks.

Yep, sounds like a broody mood to me too, what with the endless sitting and the bald patch to conduct her body heat to the eggs. Pekins are notoriously good mothers and often get used to hatch the eggs of other, less broody, hens. Our Pekins are often broody and there's not really much we can do to make them snap out of it. As others have said, just lift her off the nest every now and then to make sure she eats and drinks ok and make sure you collect the eggs more regularly so there's nothing there for her to sit on. It usually lasts around 3 weeks, as that's how long it would take for fertile eggs to hatch.

Our pekin was broody for over 4 months until we stepped in with chicken jail with layers and grit cage cups and a water tube and it is held off the pen floor on the edges of two bricks and secured with a bungee clp to a central support post, the inmate is released to roam in the afternoon when pop door is closed and we find 3 full 24hr periods in the jail = back to normal behaviour.