Northern Red Mite Issue. Nothing works

[Lillith37]

This picture comes from a Dutch research https://www.biobestrijding.nl/vogelmijtbedrijfsplan-en-roofmijten/

I’ve encountered something similar to this approach in my research. I watched this big long YouTube video for pest control technicians and I think they were referring to this.

Last week the food authorities warned the people not to eat many eggs from backyard chickens after they did a research on PFAS in eggs and found high concentrations in BYC eggs. Now they are investing more to be able to tell where exactly the PFAS is problematic and where it’s safe.

Where I live we have issues with lead in the soil. Some areas are significantly worse than others. The chickens actually cope reasonably well with blood lead but it’s very dangerous for pregnant women and young children to eat the eggs. It’s crazy how we’ve poisoned the world

 

[BDutch]

I thought I had concurred the red mites last year, but of today I start to doubt this.

Last Saturday there were a few tiny crawlers in the paper rolls I made from biscuit paper. Maybe they were rede mite in the nymph stage. But I was not sure. Yesterday I started with the Finecto+ again.
Today I checked my ribbed paper rolls again. I still didn’t see any red mite, but many more little crawlers. Hard to see. But on the white biscuit paper I definitely saw several super tiny insects.

I took out the bedding under the roosts, sprinkled a little DE and gave the chickens a rub in with DE (except for Janice my scared runaway chicken.
I sprayed my 2 broodies with Permethrin wich should be safe because they dont lay any eggs at the moment and its still a week before hatch.
Tomorrow is cleaning day. And this weekend I’m planning to make a new lid on the nest-boxes. The two broodies have to go to the tiny coop I prepared to raise the chicks. It should be free of mites but I need to check this before the weekend too.

Im going to post this and futher acknowledgements in my ‘personal’ thread about the broodies. Because I don’t want to take over this thread. But thought the readers of this thread might find it interesting.

 

[BDutch]

What a relief today: all corrugated paper roll were totally clean.

 

[Samsg1971]

Wonderful feeling!

 

[Leeles]

If you have a large infestation and conditions for mite reproduction is optimal you need to be cleaning the coops and changing the bedding every 2-3 days for several weeks. @BDutch helped me enormously when I had a red mite scare.

The best things I did was change my coop floor substrate to sand, change nest boxes to plastic tubs, change nest box bedding every week and put in pieces corrugated cardboard to check for their presence. I ended up dealing with some mite of Ornithonyssus genus but the ways to deal with free living mites affecting chickens is essentially the same.

Thank you for the corrugated cardboard idea as I'm currently dealing with mites and lice. Now in a cple days I'll know if I need to go further

 

[BDutch]

Thank you for the corrugated cardboard idea as I'm currently dealing with mites and lice. Now in a cple days I'll know if I need to go further

If you know you are dealing with red mite , better dont wait a couple of days.