Mites in my coop

[Bobinasmom]

Hi! Thanks, that makes sense. I guess I just have to make sure that it's an ingestible kind of DE, no? To be frank, I don't even know if it's mites, but my rooster has black specks on his comb as well as areas with white gunk for lack of a better word. This is a post I started elsewhere on BYC https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=440092 I think this could be a sign of mites, right? I haven't seen any on the walls of the coop, though. What has me concerned is that there is really no way that I can effectively clean the coop during our current weather conditions. The coop is far from the house and since it's been very cold, I couldn't run a garden hose all the way there without breaking the hose, I think. It's a walk-in coop and would require copious amounts of water to thoroughly clean. And then the chickens would have to live in a cold and damp coop. We are still more than a month away from warmer weather and I don't want this to get out of hand. I admit to being a bit reluctant to use sevin dust since the chicken tend to pick at the hay that we use for bedding and I wouldn't want to eat the eggs knowing that the chicken had ingested sevin dust. Will dusting the chicken with DE keep the mites at bay and then as soon as the weather warms up, I can give the coop a thorough cleaning?