The best and natural way to treat lice and mites.

[KaylorFarms]

Here are 3 good ways to treat mites on your chickens:



1. Wash and rinse a spray bottle thoroughly making sure that any liquid that used to be inside the bottle is fully gone.

2. Combine your spray ingredients. You'll need, 10 ounces of water, 5 tsps. Of garlic salt/powder, and 1 teaspoon of essential oil, such as lavender, cinnamon, basil, or thyme.

Take an empty spray bottle, put in 2 cups of water, 2 teaspoons of olive oil, and 4 tablespoons of dish soap, shake bottle up and down. Spray this mixture on your chickens, the roost poll, and the coop, including where there might be holes and cracks.

Letting your chickens dust bathe can also help prevent mites, throw a bag of Diatamacheous earth in your chicken pen, or run.

Hope this help you all!
Good luck!

 

[JaeG]

DE is a contentious product, and one that many chicken keepers are moving away from. Here's a very good article about this product: http://www.the-chicken-chick.com/2016/12/the-cut-dry-truth-about-diatomaceous.html

 

[speckledhen]

To the OP, you said "throw a bag of DE" in the run. A whole bag??? What size bag did you mean to say? I use 50# bags of DE, which last me about 2 years in my 20x24 barn with 40-something chickens. Throwing an entire bag of DE in the pen is WAY overkill, no matter how big the bag is, I need to say. Please, don't do that. You are asking for trouble. ANY fine, powdery substance, even wheat flour, can be a respiratory problem and you really don't want them breathing in that much DE.

DE is overused sometimes and dirt alone is fine in any dustbath. They really don't need it at all in a dustbath if they have access to dirt they can loosen up and roll in. DE does not worm chickens, certainly, because when it is wet as it would be inside a chicken, it has no cutting power at all. I have some hens who are crippled and unable to dustbathe so, on rare occasion, I may rub some DE under their wings and in their butt fluff because mites/lice are worse for them than the tiny amount of DE they may breathe in. I do use DE inside feed, but not at a 2% rate, not at all. I put about a 1/8-1/4 cup in a new bag of feed to make sure bugs can't just live in it in case I've missed something.

The best way I think to make sure they don't have lice/mites is to put generic invermectin pour-on on their neck skin once or twice a year if they are living and dustbathing normally. As I said, my crippled birds cannot/do not dustbathe so I must make sure for them that they don't have external pests. I've used DE for a dozen years for this purpose, but never overuse it, never had any issues with it in the flocks. And I have 8, 9 and 10 year old hens.

The key to using DE is minimal use!

Natural bug control is good, but make sure it is not overly aromatic. Avians are sensitive to aromatics. I make up a natural barn spray with a full sprayer of water, a tablespoon of dish soap and a varying amount of drops of essential oils like lemongrass, eucalyptus, lavender and peppermint, but it is just misted in the air in the barn aisle or in the poop buckets to discourage flies and help freshen the barn. To spray on roosts, in cracks and crevices, you can use a citrus oil based natural insecticide which is safe for pets like Orange Guard (not on the birds, though).

There have been studies on worming with DE where dead birds were necropsied. They had been eating feed at the 2% DE levels, or more, and their intestines were dessicated/ dried out. Plus, they still had worms. So, caution and common sense when using DE is in order.

 

[aart]

Here are 3 good ways to treat mites on your chickens:

1. Wash and rinse a spray bottle thoroughly making sure that any liquid that used to be inside the bottle is fully gone.

2. Combine your spray ingredients. You'll need, 10 ounces of water, 5 tsps. Of garlic salt/powder, and 1 teaspoon of essential oil, such as lavender, cinnamon, basil, or thyme.

Take an empty spray bottle, put in 2 cups of water, 2 teaspoons of olive oil, and 4 tablespoons of dish soap, shake bottle up and down. Spray this mixture on your chickens, the roost poll, and the coop, including where there might be holes and cracks.

Letting your chickens dust bathe can also help prevent mites, throw a bag of Diatamacheous earth in your chicken pen, or run.

Hope this help you all!
Good luck!

A(nother) mere regurgitation of ineffectual and incomplete 'information' doesn't really help anyone.

 

[Folly's place]

I'd like to add to this; what's 'natural' about dish soap??? Have you read the ingredient list? Also, there's very good information out there (see Consumer Reports, for example) about the purity and actual ingredients in those 'natural' oil products. Some very unpleasant stuff, sometimes/ often. Permethrin spray works very well and is safe and approved for use on poultry, as is the organically approved pyrethrin. Nothing useful is approved for use for intestinal parasites, and I'm with speckledhen on this one, and use Ivermectin if fecal testing shows a big worm burden. Only then, and it's been two years here since it was done. Mary

 

[casportpony]

I clean my nesting boxes weekly and had to go into super vigilant mode to get this under control, so when I tapped out my box liner onto a white paper...I found a good amount of mites happily running through the DE...well it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that obviously it's not working to well when the mites were playing hide and go seek in the stuff soooo long story short...I called BS on the DE and followed up with 3 weekly applications of Permethrin (twice) and in the middle IC3...so far so good...[/QUOTE]
DE BS... YES OR NO...FEEDBACK TIME GO!

 

[speckledhen]

One thing folks sometimes do not realize about DE. It can kill soft-bodied bugs, but it is not a poison so it does not work instantly like invermectin would. It takes time.

Many years ago, I did use DE when I got my first rooster, who was overloaded with lice running highways on his bum, and it did work, but he was in quarantine and I removed every bit of shavings from his metal cage, dusted him and put all new bedding, no crevices for pests to hide as he was in my basement bathroom, all tile and vinyl, not a coop with all the other birds and places to hide in roosts, etc. It did eliminate them, yes, but he was in quarantine for 5 weeks and with nowhere for them to hide except on him, it did okay. If I had found an entire flock infested, I would have brought out the big guns and nipped it in the bud immediately.

Lice/mites are worse for chickens than any mild insecticide you may use infrequently. If they have access to good dustbathing dirt and the pens/coops are managed well, etc, you won't have to use it often. I've never found lice/mites on any of my birds other than that rooster who came to me with them (he also suffered from severe malnutrition and a fungal infection of the comb so his immune system was down).

Just last week, I was at the kitchen table balancing my checkbook when a tiny mite-like creature crawled over the paper. I mashed it and it seemed like it was full of blood. Since I had just been in the barn handling my elderly hens, some of whom must lay on the floor 24/7 due to arthritis, I had no idea if I brought it back with me from them or where it came from. I checked over the hens I was holding and did not see anything, but just to be safe, I used invermectin on every non-laying hen and rooster in the barn, just in case. They were wormed a few months ago with Valbazen, but that won't kill external parasites, of course, not to my knowledge. Best to be sure, I felt, so invermectin came out and they got dosed. And I am not even sure it was on me, could have just been in the house.