Solitary chicken - need advice

[Lovemygirls]

So at the weekend I found red mites. I have a green frog house, so I dismantled it and used poultry shield, washed it down, poultry shield again, washed it down, put it back together, sprayed it with mite and lice spray, used loads of DE. Can you completely get rid of red mites? how often should I do this now?. How do I get the girls to go back on the house?

[Beantree]

I wouldn't bother with Poultry Shield Lovemygirls. They will happily swim in it. Good for removing the eggs is Smite, because it contains a detergent. But it doesn't kill them so well, so we use Nettex Total Mite Kill which we buy undiluted in 2 litre (?) containers. The undiluted isn't pink. Nothing I've found but creosote kills the eggs. So in a weeks time you may have more. Steam cleaners are good, but the downside is they blow some of the mites and eggs outside.

 

You can't completely get rid of them once you have them. They can live 'off host' for up to two weeks outside on the ground but the biggest problem is that they also live on the birds and they are very difficult to get off.

 

I've been experimenting here a lot. We have 8 coops and all have mite to one extent or another. They seem to be coming from a pigeon's nest in a tree above and spreading depending on wind direction. I check the perches every morning and kill all on them. My next idea is to wrap fly paper around the ends of the perches to stop the mite escaping into the coop (atm I'm creosoting the ends). But they do drop onto the bedding and breed, so we have removed all the bedding and use newspaper. The mite go underneath and the birds crush them when they walk around. At the edges of the floor I sprinkle ant and crawling insect killer. This stops them going up the walls.

 

I am now considering natural predators. Ants will eat red mite, so if you can encourage them that helps control. We left a coop empty for several weeks and the ants almost, but not quite, wiped all the mites out. Problem is they leave if there is no food and there are still eggs remaining to hatch. It appears lice eat red mite on the birds. The only coop consistently coming up clean on the perches is one where we had an outbreak of lice. I was told by a very experienced breeder that he knows lice eat Northern Fowl Mite, so if they have lice they won't get NFM.

 

You need to be checking every week. Taping a straw to the underside of the perches allows you to spot the mites because they will hide in there. There is another product now which is a trap with sticky paper which you put under the perches. It won't kill all the mites, just tell you how bad the infestation is getting.

 

Just put the girls in the house. They will realise after the first night that there are no mite in there and return to normal. A sign that things are bad is late roosting. A sign you have mite in the coop is hens digging through the bedding looking for them to eat. You will now need to be very observant.