Chickens have stopped laying!!!Help

[can you hear me now?]

Hi I am postivie this question has been asked before.I have some RIR's and White Leghorns, both said to be cold hearty egg laying chickens. They were laying when it started getting cold, then after a good cold snap they stopped laying. I know of others that live around me that have laying hens and they don't have a problem with no eggs. I was mainly wanting to know what i can do to get my girls to go back to laying.Is there anything i can do to stimulate them enough to start laying again?I have light in my coop already and I just removed my heater that I had in there for them. None of the other people I have talked to used heat and are still getting eggs.Anyone please, any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[chickado]

Ours slowed down so we upped their laying mash and we're getting eggs out of our ears!

 

[swtangel321]

How many hours of light are you giving them ??

 

[davidb]

when the weather clears they will start back

 

[Chicken Woman]

If you are using light it shouldn't be on all the time. Do you have it on a timer ?
My light 40 watts is on 15 hours a day and mine are laying fine .

It's been really cold on and off even a few nights of -22 !

 

[eggzettera]

I have heard that cayenne pepper helps boost their metabolism, don't have any real experience with it though

 

[Baybrio]

Don't forget to check for lice or mites.

This is our first winter with chickens and we didn't recognize the signs until one of our white roosters had a sore. We brought him in to treat the sore and WOW, mites all over. The odd thing is I never noticed the flock scratching themselves.

We treated with Sevin and within a week egg production has doubled. (Thanks to BYC posts we learned how to treat for mites) We thought ours had slowed down egg production due to the weather but it must have been the mites.

The mites must have come from wild birds because we purchased all ours as day old chicks from major hatcheries and I certainly did not see any on the babies.

 

[dancingbear]

In the winter, my free-range birds don't get as much protein as they do when there are all kinds of bugs and little critters for them to eat. Also, with shorter days, they don't have as many hours a day to eat. I find that winter egg production is fine, as long as I increase the protein and calories of the feed. I feed layer ration, fortified with added soybean mean. I give them whole corn, scratch, and black oil sunflower seed for a treat every day.

Now that they've finished molting, (or most of them have) I'm getting lots of eggs, including some tiny little pullet eggs from later-summer hatched chicks, just coming into lay.

In my location, they don't really need supplemental light, but if you have less than 8 or 9 hours a day where you are, they may need some extra.