I cannot get rid of MITES!

[Chickadeedeedeedee]

Hello! I've had my girls for almost 4 years now. I didn't have trouble with mites until recently. I've tried so many things! Regular cleaning, DE, elector psp after every cleaning, permethrin spray etc. We even moved during this time and had to disassemble the coop to transport it. So we power washed all pieces and then treated with elector. Things seemed to calm down for a bit but the mites weren't completely gone.

This week my copper maran went broody. She slept in the nest a few nights before I realized she was doing so (she's been out during the day so I didn't realize she was broody) and when I cleaned the coop yesterday the nest was COVERED in mites! Poor girl! I made sure she didn't sleep there last night but I'm feeling so discouraged because I cannot get rid of these things! Help!

 

[Perris]

what is the coop made of?

 

[StinkyAcres]

Mites can be difficult to eliminate. You have to reapply the mite treatment to the birds and the coop and clean the coop every week for a few weeks. Permethrin dust ("Garden and Poultry Dust") worked for me eventually.

 

[cath_campbell]

Try Exzolt, it's amazing! I've had recurring red mites for longer than I can remember, and I had tried everything: permethrin spray, permethrin dust everywhere, Elector PSP, bifenthrin, DE, ivermectin, on the hens and all over the coop. I even took the coop apart a few times, took the siding off, the roof off, and sprayed everywhere... no matter what I did, there was always a couple left somewhere, and they would reproduce.

Anyway, I found Exzolt while searching the web, and it's available for backyard chicken keepers in Europe. Unfortunately, it's only available for commercial poultry facilities here in the US. But here's the solution: the active ingredient in Ezxolt is fluralaner, and this is available for mite treatments in dogs, called Bravecto. If you can get it from your vet, great, just ask for a prescription for one dog chew!
https://www.chewy.com/bravecto-1-month-chews-dogs-44-99-lbs/dp/281396

You can also buy it from VetShopMax in Australia, and they will ship it to the US without a prescription. This is what I used, the dog chews, that I bought from the australian site, and they shipped it to me. I split the chew into tiny chunks and gave it to my hens in the appropriate dosage, and now all my mites are gone. ALL GONE! It's literally a miracle!

The fluralaner dose in chickens is 0.5mg/kg body weight. So if your hens are wound 2kg (~4.4 lbs), then you would give them 1mg orally. If they are 3kg (6.6 lbs), then you would give 1.5mg. I bought the dog chews, and weighed the chew and split it up so that I had tiny little chunks of about 1 to 2mg for each of my hens. You may need a precise digital scale to weigh the chunks. The Bravecto chew for small 4-9 lbs dogs contains 45mg fluralaner. You have to split this into 20 to 45 little chunks, depending on the weight of your hens, and administer a chunk orally to each hen. And repeat in 7 days.

There are several studies on the exzolt.com website that you can read, regarding the efficacy of fluralaner against red poultry mites and some on pubmed too. This is an article where they used either the topical fluralaner, or oral, and they evaluated 0.5mg/kg and 2.5mg/kg:
https://parasitesandvectors.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13071-022-05555-6

Good luck!

 

[Three Stents]

How do chickens get mites? We have doves and had them over 10 years and never a mite in site. Spreading Diatomaceous earth around the coop and will kill/control mites?

 

[Debbie292d]

How do chickens get mites? We have doves and had them over 10 years and never a mite in site.

Mostly from wild birds and small animals like squirrels, chipmunks, rats, etc. Thus, free-rangers like ours are more susceptible to getting them than those who keep theirs in runs.

Scaly leg mites (SLM), I have no idea how ours get those though. I just know feathered feet chickens are more prone to them, and ours are silkies. DE won't kill those kinds of mites either. We treat our chickens about every two years for those.