Just found cockroaches the size of hamsters in my coop. HELLLPPP!!!!!

[Delmar]

Just catch them
http://www.pixiechickens.com/1387/how-to-catch-roaches-for-feeding-your-serama-chickens/

 

[aggie9296]

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Ha! My husband uses it to kill them in the house! Haha had not even thought of using it outside. It does work great...we have gotten to where we need to use it less and less frequently inside even.
Thanks!
ETA: Nice to meet you . We are close.

Nice to meet you, too. Very close. I even know where Altha and Alford are! I'll be camping at Torreya for Memorial Day, so we'll really be close by. Small world. Guy on here from Lynn Haven too.

 

[LindsayB]

Last year we had a roach investation in the coop. It was sooo NASTY!!! I hate roaches with a passion...they're really the only bug I'm afraid of. I started noticing roaches around the coop at night but just figured they were from all the big pine trees we have around us. Then one day I went to clean the coop out and found tons of them. Theres a 3 inch gap between the wall and the automatic door and there must have been a hundred piled in there. And these suckers were HUGE!

I let the girls out of the run/coop area and got the poison ready...I used the liquid sevin concentrate in our big sprayer and started spraying the walls and cracks in the coop...It was like a scene from a horror movie...All you saw were roaches running everywhere...After I sprayed everything I left the coop for about an hour and then went back out to clean up the bugs and put fresh shavings down. I now spray the inside of the coop every month and haven't seen a roach in there since..thank god... I would strongly suggest spraying some kind of pesticide in the coop. But do make sure the chickens won't be around it when its wet and that it doesn't touch their food/water.

 

[CarolAnn]

My first thought is to get yourself some food grade DE. Clean out your coop, nesting boxes, everything, then put down a thin layer of DE, fresh layer of litter and another thin layer of DE. You can kick the littler around a little to mix in the DE. The DE will penetrate the roaches shell on contact and dehydrate them. That spells DEAD. I don't dust my birds because they take dust baths in the litter with the DE and get it all over. Much safer than dusting them with a chemical, in my opinion. I also put DE on their feed once a week to kill internal parasites. I sprinkle it around the floorboards of the feed storage are of my coop to kill/discourage pests. So far the only pests I've had to deal with was wasps that stopped by last month to check out the coop. They didn't stay. I keep a sticky fly trap hanging high at the ceiling during the warm months. I've only had chickens for a year now, but I'm learning fast with the help of my peeps on BYC.

I bought 50# of food grade (must be food grade to use with animals) DE at a farm store in Topeka, Kansas for $30. Maybe used a 5th of it since Fall. I've given some away too.

Oh, and THANKS for the entertaining commentary on finding the roaches! Cracked me up!! I'm a girl but every time I hear someone say "I screamed like a girl" it just cracks me up. Guess it's because it's always guys saying it. You just have to able to laugh at yourself. It's so healthy!!

 

[dawg53]

DE has no effect on Palmetto Bugs....they eat DE for breakfast. They are all over around here and in Florida.

 

[aggie9296]

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OK, now you're just trying to freak out all the bug haters! That's NOT a palmetto! And I had a friend that had them for pets. Who knows why.

 

[dawg53]

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OK, now you're just trying to freak out all the bug haters! That's NOT a palmetto! And I had a friend that had them for pets. Who knows why.

Here you go:
http://www.ehow.com/how_4443826_rid-palmetto-bugs.html

 

[aggie9296]

That's a Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. Don't fly and often kept as pets.

http://entomology.unl.edu/k12/croach/roachinfo/roachpage.html


Palmettos are WAY smaller. And flat. And don't get THAT big.

http://wildflowers.jdcc.edu/Palmetto_Bug.html


ALthough when one lands in your hair, it does seem about 5 inches long.

 

[Sonoran Silkies]

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For the most part, chicken are active during the day and sleep at night, and cockroaches sleep during the day and are active at night. My chickens usually seem completely uninterested in eating cockroaches, even when they are both active at the same time. A worm or a moth, now, and it is an entirely different story.

 

[dawg53]

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We have big red spiders that drop down out of the trees at night around here too.