Northern fowl mite. Please help!

[my beautiful girls]

I have been battling NFM for 2 months now. I have deep cleaned coop 4 times. White washed the inside. My girls are still suffering from these pests. They have red and bare patches on their breast/vent area and some hens on their necks. Shaking their heads often. I have sprayed them with permethrin as well as the coop. I have used ivermectin, Elector psp bath last week worked for 6 days and they are shaking their heads again and red skin. sprayed coop with elector psp as well. I thought elector psp was a one and done treatment? Baths are very stressful on my girls. I originally sprayed them with elector psp, but it did not work as well as the bath. I'm about to try 10% garlic juice spray next. or sulphur powder. what am I missing? I really want to be done with these mites. So many chemicals on my girls cant be good. egg production has dropped way down as well. does any one have a treatment that works? can you give hens elector psp weekly? combine various treatments?

 

[Eggcessive]

Mites hatch every 3-5 days, then will eventually mature and start to lay more eggs. So mite treatment has to be done once, and then in 7 days to get the newly hatched eggs. Then in 7 more days, consider checking for more or just doing a third treatment. Do you know how you first got the mites? If you use straw, you may want to switch ton pine shavings or sand, since mites may hide inside straw, which could be a way to introduce them. Lice are a little easier to deal with than mites which are difficult to control. NFM usually need a host, and removing treated birds to a different facility for 3 weeks, can break the lifecycle, because they cannot live that long without blood. Here is a good article with a section on the type of mites you described:
https://cpif.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/LIce-and-Mites-copy-3.pdf

 

[my beautiful girls]

Mites hatch every 3-5 days, then will eventually mature and start to lay more eggs. So mite treatment has to be done once, and then in 7 days to get the newly hatched eggs. Then in 7 more days, consider checking for more or just doing a third treatment. Do you know how you first got the mites? If you use straw, you may want to switch ton pine shavings or sand, since mites may hide inside straw, which could be a way to introduce them. Lice are a little easier to deal with than mites which are difficult to control. NFM usually need a host, and removing treated birds to a different facility for 3 weeks, can break the lifecycle, because they cannot live that long without blood. Here is a good article with a section on the type of mites you described:
https://cpif.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/LIce-and-Mites-copy-3.pdf

thank you for the information. this is extremely frustrating for me and my girls. I hope the next 2 treatments will finish this. I did change my nesting material to aspen nesting pads and change every week and i put sand in the coop on the floor instead of hemp litter. I change nesting pads every week and clean boxes. I threw out all the straw and bale.

 

[Debbie292d]

I have been battling NFM for 2 months now. I have deep cleaned coop 4 times. White washed the inside. My girls are still suffering from these pests. They have red and bare patches on their breast/vent area and some hens on their necks. Shaking their heads often. I have sprayed them with permethrin as well as the coop. I have used ivermectin, Elector psp bath last week worked for 6 days and they are shaking their heads again and red skin. sprayed coop with elector psp as well. I thought elector psp was a one and done treatment? Baths are very stressful on my girls. I originally sprayed them with elector psp, but it did not work as well as the bath. I'm about to try 10% garlic juice spray next. or sulphur powder. what am I missing? I really want to be done with these mites. So many chemicals on my girls cant be good. egg production has dropped way down as well. does any one have a treatment that works? can you give hens elector psp weekly? combine various treatments?

While food grade DE (diatomaceous earth) and/or 1st Sat. Lime can't do fast work on a mite infestation, both of those are all natural, no chemicals, and I've used one or the other religiously twice monthly and never have mites, lice, or ants in our coop, albeit they are exposed to them as they free range with the chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, and wild birds under the wild bird feeders. We've mostly stuck with the DE as it's way cheaper but either work and work well. If I were you I'd kick the chickens out of the coop, throw on a mask, and sprinkle DE all over your floor, nest boxes, and roosts, then let them back in and go do that around your coop and in all of their dust baths. If outside and it rains, you'd have to redo it right away, otherwise, every two weeks is good enough.

 

[chicken1234]

I moved the girls to a small coop but could see I brought the mites with them so I cleaned the new coop out, sprayed with pyrethrin spray, dusted with DE and put shavings down. I raked out the pen dusted with DE and put fresh sand down and I removed all the clutter. I also bathed the hens in borax/dish soap and removed crusts on butts and I used ivermectin pour on. I did this once a week for a month (only bathed once) and mine are gone and the hens are doing great and they were crawling with them. I also dumped the old shavings, feathers in a area we never use far away from my coop and garden. I also added a ash/mulch/sand dust bath. The old coop is sitting totally empty but we are going to tear it down, its sort of done its purpose and we will build new. When I bathed my girls I dipped them into a bucket of warm soapy water and kept them in it for probably five minutes then I let them out to walk around all soapy until I finished each one. Then I filled the bucket with warm rinse water and rinsed them removing the crusts that had time to soften.