Why Aren't My Chickens Laying? Here Are Your Answers!

[speckledhen]

Yes, that's the way it's usually done. I've been known to skip the second worming, though, truth be told.


It won't kill the chickens, Cass, of course. The 250 ml bottle is only about $15 or so, depending on where you buy it. It's about 5 drops on the back of the neck for standards and 2 drops for bantams, so it should go a long way. I'd prefer to use Valbazen, which will get every worm known to infest chickens, but a bottle of that is about $40, so invermectin it is. That gets most everything anyway, including lice.

 

[Cass]

Quote:
Earthworms can be host to any and all internal worms in livestock. Since I worm my chickens twice a year (more often if I notice anything in the poo) I didn't see the harm in feeding them to the chickens. Ahhh...I was wrong. They stopped laying. I wormed them again. They have never really resumed laying at the rate they were prior to their earthworm gluttony. Since my chicken free range daily there is no way I can keep them from eating worms once in a while, but from now on they are going to have to find them themselved. I learned my lesson and am sincerely glad the whole flock wasn't of laying age at the time. When the pullets start laying they will take up the slack in my egg basket.

I don't know if this would apply to chickens, but one vet I use says that two wormings are needed for my cats and dogs: the first worming kills the adult worms, the second (I think about 10 days later) kills any newly hatched worms that were eggs during the first worming, before they can mature enough to reproduce.

Yes, you should worm your chickens twice, 10 days apart, using 2 different products so you are sure you have killed off ALL kinds of worms that like chicken intestines. I didn't know that you were supposed to do cats and dogs twice...hmmm...might explain why my cat is so darn skinny, even though I worm her 2 or 3 times a year. But only ONE dose. Grr...live and learn...thanks for the info.

 

[chiggerbit]

Yeah, well the other vet I used to use never told me that I needed to worm the cats and dogs twice, just this second vet. Good to know that I need to do chickens twice, too. Thanks.

 

[meezermom]

Do you mean Ivermectin Pour-On for livestock? Just wondering as I had never heard of Invermectin...

 

[Cass]

Quote:
Yes...that's the product. It is "off label" usage....you only use like 1cc per LF bird, directly on the skin behind the neck and .5cc per bantam. I am not looking forward to finding the skin through all the feathers, but I am told that it works very well and is worth the effort.

 

[speckledhen]

I just finished worming all 45 birds yesterday. Whew! Glad that's done. I do not worm on a regular basis, never have, but my birds have spent more time penned this summer than normal because I was trying to keep them from running around so much in the unusually high heat index we've had for 3 months non-stop. Free range birds are less susceptible to worms than penned birds, probably because they find natural wormers out on range somehow. Felt it was a perfect time to do this since production was down (only got 7 eggs yesterday) so wouldn't be missing that much. Some of the birds are youngsters who haven't begun laying yet, but will very soon as they are approaching 20 weeks old now.

 

[Cass]

Quote:
Congrats...sounds like a tough job.

How did you make sure you got each bird and not the same bird twice?

 

[speckledhen]

Believe it or not, we have a list of the birds by name and breed in each flock. I printed it out and marked them off as we got each one done. The main flock is the largest, with 22 birds in it, then the BBS Orp quad, then the BR quad plus two EEs, then the 7 bantams with 5 standards living in there with them. We got the bantam coop after they were on the roost, just plucked them down one by one and put them back as we did it. Wasn't really that hard.

 

[chiggerbit]

Quote:
Yes...that's the product. It is "off label" usage....you only use like 1cc per LF bird, directly on the skin behind the neck and .5cc per bantam. I am not looking forward to finding the skin through all the feathers, but I am told that it works very well and is worth the effort.

So, what do you use to measure the dose? Does a dropper come with the package?

 

[speckledhen]

You can use a needle-less syringe to measure cc's/ml's, but I just used an eyedropper and did 5 drops for standards and 2 for bantams.

Oops, I forgot Zane! Have to worm Zane, too. He lives in his own cage inside Suede's coop and doesn't hit the ground much (he's crippled). Thought about him, then forgot and now, remembered him again. Gotta go before it leaks out of my brain again!