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I'm pretty sure we've got mites. A few of the hens have been looking a big ragged, and I cleaned out the pine chips in the coop 2 days ago and noticed a patch of tiny gray bugs (very tiny) crawling around on the floor. The weather has also been excessively hot and humid. I am trying to remediate...

I have 9 hens. 3 BOs that never learned to roost, and later we hatched 6 more RIRs that DID roost (because we added a better roosting bar). The BOs have been sleeping in the egg boxes pretty much since we moved them outside into the coop 3 years ago. I put big flowerpots in the egg boxes at...

We have 6 RIRs that are almost a year old, and 3 BO's that are 2.5 years old. The BOs don't seem to be good layers, as we usually only get 6 eggs per day, sometimes 7. I think only 1 is laying anymore, and 1 I don't think ever laid eggs. Today I found this one tiny egg. Why would that happen...

We got a bucket of spent grain from a local brewery today, and I thought I'd ask of those more knowledgeable than I - how much of their diet is it ok for the spent grains to make up? Can I feed it to them for the next 3 days or so until the bucket is gone, or should it only be more of an...

The first one is enormous (next to a regular egg for reference), and it always has a double yolk and has a ring around it as if 2 eggs combined into one. The other egg has a firm shell but is all wrinkled and misshapen. We get one of each of these every 1-2 days. For a while we were getting 1...

My chicken-keeping headaches got worse this week with the discovery of what we think are northern red mites. I plan to get permethrin spray this weekend at TSC, but I've never done this before, and my coop setup really stinks, so I was wondering what else will I need to apply the permethrin? A...

We have 3 hens just about 2 years old, and 6 pullets that are 21 weeks old. One of our 3 hens has always been smaller and weaker than the others, and quite frankly, I don't think she ever laid any eggs. When we only had 3, we would only get 1-2 eggs per day, and I'm 99% sure none were from...

Our 6 RIRs were 17 weeks old this past Friday, hatched here in an incubator, ordered from a hatchery. I have yet to hear anybody crow, and none of them look different than the others. One has a redder, bigger comb than the others, but the 3 BO 2 year old hens we have all have different...

If I put tap water in a gallon water jug and leave it with the cap off, will the chlorine evaporate enough to be able to use it for FFing? I've been buying spring water, but this is going to start to add up.....I'm just unsure that the small opening in a 1-gallon water jug will allow for...

If I don't close off my egg boxes, the chickens sleep in them and they are filled with poop the next morning. I had left it closed off when they stopped laying around December (well, of my 3 hens, only 2 lay eggs - the other never laid eggs and she's 1.5 years old now, but a favorite of my kids...

All you lovely folks here at BYC (I'm especially looking at you, @azygous , @henless and @Blooie ) have helped me SO much with getting my chicks living out in the coop, and with finding a system of FF feeding that worked. I hatched them inside the house at the beginning of November (100% hatch...

I love the IDEA of FF, especially since I feed the Scratch and Peck which is a whole-grain unprocessed feed. But I have tried at least 3 times over the past year and a half, and no matter what I do, my hens refuse to eat it. It was nothing but a PITA just so that they would refuse. It would...

Just before they turned 2 weeks old I put then out in the coop with a MHP and.....they are still doing well! SO glad I got them outside, and it took 2 days but they figured out how to get in and out of their "panic pen" on their own. It has been sooooo cold and windy, and they've been wandering...

I covered the bottom and 2/3 of the way up with plastic sheeting. I found a heating pad that doesn't have auto shutoff. I tied it to the underside of a cookie cooling rack and covered with a towel. I've got the MHP running with a thermometer in there to see if it gets warm enough while the...

I couldn't find anything to make the cave skeleton with, I live in suburban NJ. This is not agriculture country. The nearest TSC is 45 minutes away and that's the ONLY place to get anything remotely farmy. Clearly, I don't have flexible fencing just laying around and didn't want to shell out...

I hatched 6 RIR chicks from an incubator 1 week ago. So far I have them in a brooder (a large plastic storage tub with a hardware cloth lid) under a heat lamp. I didn't really want to brood them in the house this time, but I hadn't come up with another solution by the time they hatched. I...

Our 5 BO chicks last year grew out of the brooder at around 6 weeks old, but it was June and warm enough for them to sleep outside in the coop. This time there is one more (they are all RIR), and in 6 weeks it will be mid-December and probably in the 20's-30's at night and 30's-40's during the...

Today was day 21 (at 8 this morning), and 1 of my 6 had pipped by 8 am. I left for the store and was gone a half an hour, and when I got back the chick had hatched! It hatched around 4 pm, and has been walking around (or trying to) all over, rolling the other eggs all around. Also, I'm...

So, after 25 days in the incubator, I finally gave up on my 5 "duds" (my first time incubating, and I was using a borrowed incubator). My husband cracked them open (I didn't want to see any dead chickies), and all 5 of them were liquid inside, one of them popped when he cracked it and smelled...

I set the eggs at 9:30 pm Sept 8, so 9:30 tonight was a full 22 days and no signs of hatching. A few days ago I put my own thermometer/humidity device inside the (borrowed) incubator and it has been reading 3 degrees lower than the screen on the incubator. I'm guessing this is why I have no...