Flies in chicken coop

[herefordlovinglady]

Quote:

 

[jomercer]

"Ready-to-use dichlorvos (Vapona

) 20% resin strips can be used at the rate of one strip per 1,000 cubic feet of enclosed area. Strips will need to be replaced as they lose their effective-ness, or about every 3 months.... Follow label directions. ...resin strips...may become dusty and dirty if used for long periods."

from Poultry Pest Management, Texas A&M Extension, http://insects.tamu.edu/extension/bulletins/b-1088.html, available September 1, 2010

Many moons ago as an undergrad, I heard a visiting lecturer from a zoo say that they put reptiles in a covered shoebox with a vapona strip to treat them for mites.

 

[JayBird+16]

Fly paper works for me, just put it somewhere your bird can't get into it. Trying to pull a strip of fly paper off a Rooster is hard work!

 

[colada584]

Quote:

that just made me laugh.....my cat, a toad, and my cat again hahaha

 

[noodleroo]

Use pine shavings, sprinkle DE in them and hang one of the really stinky vanilla scented 'Christmas tree' car air fresheners in the coop. It does seem to help...

 

[labargeioson]

I've also read that you can get wasps to control flies. They are non-stinging and safe for humans and animals. Their only job is to kill and eat flies and fly larvae.

http://www.jefferslivestock.com/ssc/product.asp?CID=2&pf_id=14043

 

[Terri O]

On a similar note to the above poster...I have used Fly Predators for four years now. I have LOTS of animals and they really do work well. THere is a worksheet on their website that calculated how many you need to disperse a month. I dont use any flyspray on my horses at all during the summer because we have very few flies here. The remaining ones I trap in a Big Stinky fly trap

Just dont get that attractant on your hands...the flies literally wont leave you alone!

 

[oldchickenlady]

Dont use the hay, it does not help with moisture. It will be dry on top but wet on the bottom and the flies will lay their eggs underneath it. Rake out all the hay and use pine shavings. Sprinkle with DE and/or Stall Dry or Sweet PDZ (can get both at feed stores, TSC, farmer's co-ops). Fly predators (a tiny parasitic wasp) are great also, but you have to start using them at the beginning of the fly season. They lay their eggs inside the fly maggots and when the wasps hatch they eat the maggots. There are a couple of websites that sell them, Arbico Organics and Fly Predators.com. I have horses and they greatly decrease the number of flies. The chickens help also. I don't have much of a fly problem in my run, it is my horse pasture that attracts them. I do rake the run out when it starts to get yucky. Not too often though, they free range all day, every day.

 

[Kwartel]

I use pine shavings and DE and it seems to work great for me. You just have to watch if you keep a waterer inside the coop that it doesn't stay wet underneath. I use a hanging waterer and when I take it out every day to refill it, my birds go nuts scratching underneath where it was. By the time I get back, they have a bare spot cleared out and any bedding that was wet gets scratched out and dries.

 

[5Leepy!]

Quote:

I am SO GLAD I'm not the only one this happened to. My husband hung strips around the outside of the coop and when I went to peek through a crack between the wood to check on the girls the side of my face and hair got stuck on the dang thing (it was flapping around in the breeze). I just mosied into the house with it stuck on my face and told DH that they were on their roost for the night. When he looked up he almost fell out of his chair laughing.

Oh... and Peanut Butter worked.