Broody hens..again

We have a couple of broody hens, I noticed on Sunday and have watched for a couple of days and sure enough they are staying in the same place, which is at least safely inside the hen hut, both in the same nesting box. They are sat on around 20 eggs. 

This happened around this time last year, and we got 10 hatch last year between 3 mothers who were all squeezed in to one nesting box. A couple died in the first few days, which is always heartbreaking, but the rest flourished and we ended up with 5 hens and 3 cockerels. Our adult cockerel went missing not long before they reached maturity, we never found out what happened to him, it's unusual for a fox to just take 1 bird, plus we couldn't find the strike point, so we assume he didn't like the competition, he was an old lad, and went off. 

One of the cockerels grew into a beautiful bird and replaced him as father of the flock, but the other two were ugly whitish birds, pretty hefty looking things and they started ganging up on the girls to have their way with them. I ended up cornering them one day and getting Mike to despatch them. So we have a dozen birds at the moment, and are swamped with eggs, the two broodies will slow that down a little, but everyone that comes to the house leaves with eggs at the moment.