Treating Lice and Mites

Hmm... I searched lice and mites in the search, but didn't come up with the answer I was seeking.

I'm treating my new flock tomorrow for internal parasites (water additive) as well as external (dust). I know you're not supposed to consume the eggs or meat for 1 week after using the water treatment, but what about the dust? The back of the container doesn't say, just says to treat again after 4 weeks if needed. Do I just throw these eggs away or do I hard boil them and feed them back to the birds? Eggs are pourous though, no? I thought I'd ask to make sure... if they can safely get nutrition from them still, I would like to give them back.

Also, I noted it says to treat the bedding to shake the dust down, etc. Should I clear the bedding, or treat it, wait the 4 weeks, clear and re-treat the bedding? I'm picking up some Dico earth and making a little sand box for them in their coop as these forums have taught me it's super helpful at keeping pests at bay. I'll also look at the 'No pest' strips I read about on my search here for this info.

Thanks so much!

I'm just going to throw this out there: FORGET THE DUST!

If you are going to hang the No Pest strips, then don't even bother with the dust. For years I used rotenone and inhaled enough of that nasty USELESS junk to kill a cow. DO NOT DO THIS! The No Pests strip is going to accomplish this task much more efficiently and with less risk to your own personal health! You do not need to expose yourself to this, so don't. If you absolutely insist on powdering your birds, wear a mask! That rotenone gave me the worst sore throats before I got wise and put a mask on. Had I known about No PEst strips back then, I never ever would have brought that rotenone powder onto my property.

As for water additive wormer, do you mean piperazine? Piperazine is what you will take yourself and give your kids if you get wormy. therefore it is safe to consume the eggs of chickens that are treated with piperazine. I even checked this out with the poison control centre.

If you mean Eprinex in the water (not the way I would suggest using it!) it is also a slaughter approved wormer. Used in dairy animals and domestic deer, NO WITHDRAWL time is suggested and NO MILK TOSSING. Thus one can assume it is safe to eat the eggs, BUT this is a personal choice and if you feel better tossing, then toss. Ivermectin does NOT have the same labelling but I have never used it in my birds. HOwever I only know of it as a pour-on, meaning you DO NOT give it to the birds by mouth, but should drop it on their skin. BUt people have used it in water. I trust someone who has will tell you how to go about this.

I already bought the dust, and I'm a "No receipt" thanks, person LOL. I'll use it this go around and use the No pet strips in the future. Still interested as to whether or not the eggs are viable for human and/or chicken consumption after dust use.

I bought piperazine. I'm doing the measurements tonight for the water, as it just gives instructions on per pack... since I don't have a 320L waterer, I'll do the math LOL. That's interesting, I didn't know it was the same stuff for humans... I suppose I've been lucky and only ever gotten lice as a child. Huzzah clean hair!

Ivermectin will kill all internal and external parasites injectable for in the water, I have never dusted but do use vapona no pest strips, the Ivermectin pour on is put on the skin and is effective.

There's no withdrawal time using the dust.

uno wrote:
If you are going to hang the No Pest strips, then don't even bother with the dust.

No pest strips kill mites onthe birds? hmm have to find some HOw far away do you have to hang them ?
Geri

Rasilon wrote:

uno wrote:
If you are going to hang the No Pest strips, then don't even bother with the dust.

No pest strips kill mites onthe birds? hmm have to find some HOw far away do you have to hang them ?
Geri

Canadian Tire carries the no pest strips
I just hang a couple in the coops is all I do
others will have to say how they do it

Same here, I hang one strip in a 12x12 hen house. Larger, draftier hen houses may require more strips.

Yes, they kill lice, which live on the birds, and mites, which live in the hen house. (but crawl onto birds at night)

Hillbilly wrote: There's no withdrawal time using the dust.

Actually I found a chart that gives a one week egg withdrawl time for the dusting powder. Mainly at issue is the dust falling onto the eggs when the hen lays.

crazybarnlady wrote:

Hillbilly wrote: There's no withdrawal time using the dust.

Actually I found a chart that gives a one week egg withdrawl time for the dusting powder. Mainly at issue is the dust falling onto the eggs when the hen lays.

That's what I was wondering. But if you dust the whole coop, wouldn't you have to empty the bedding before the eggs were edible?

Before I add my two bits Sweetened, first tell me, are you treating to prevent mites and lice or do you already have them? And the best time to check is at night when they're roosting, examining their vents closely with a really good flashlight that someone else is holding or is free standing (or if possible, use your high beam lights from your car if you can get it close to your chicken coop ).

Anyways, do tell first, for prevention/deterring or killing the mites and lice you already have?

ChicoryFarm wrote:Before I add my two bits Sweetened, first tell me, are you treating to prevent mites and lice or do you already have them? And the best time to check is at night when they're roosting, examining their vents closely with a really good flashlight that someone else is holding or is free standing (or if possible, use your high beam lights from your car if you can get it close to your chicken coop ).

Anyways, do tell first, for prevention/deterring or killing the mites and lice you already have?

It's for treatment! Your advice to do this in my original "roosters" post is why I found out! Thanks for your help.

My 2 cents - dusting powder of any kind is worthless for use on the bird. For the amount you need to use you end up inhaling more even when using outside.
FIRST - clean your coop. Wash what you can and items that can be removed let them dry in the sun. Change all bedding. Once everything is clean, then use the dusting powder on your coop making sure to hit the nooks and crannies.

For feather lice, use Ivormec pour on. Use a syringe, minus the needle, measure 1/4 CC per 5 to 7 lbs bird and apply to the back of the neck where the chicken can't reach. When I do my birds, one application for lice can last for up to 3 months.

As for mites. Mites are the damest worst thing to get rid of. The most common is the Northern Fowl Mite also called brown mite. You can tell the difference from feather lice on inspecting the birds bum. Feather lice tend to like staying around the vent and are rice shaped and straw colored. Mites are usually found higher up above the vent into the tall feathers of the tail area or lower into the fluffy parts of the rear. If a bird is heavly infested you will see them easily on the feathers.
Mites look like specs of pepper, black grains and are red after feeding.

You need to take an aggressive approach if you HAVE them. A mites life cycle is 1 week and while pour on will kill the adults, they won't kill the gnats. I treat using a Flea and Mite spray for cage birds. Have someone hold the bird and look through the feathers and spray treatment directly on the mites. They will be killed instantly.
Leave for 24 hours. If infestation is bad I recommend washing the bird rear making sure to flush the rear tail feathers and soak the rear to get all the dead mites out.
If there is any crust, remove what you can as mites will hide under dried crust.

Wait 48 hours after washing and recheck the WHOLE bird as mites you missed will move to another part of the bird. Especially if you have a creasted breed as the mites will go to work in the crested and can hide up in the nostril cavity when washed. Reapply the spray even if you don't see any mites. Pay attention to the feather shafts of the upper tail feathers above the rear as I found they like to start there first.

If you cannot find a Flea and Mite spray for cage birds you can use Flea and Tick spray meant for dogs and cats to treat. Some of these products like the ones by Hartz will say toxic to birds but I have been told by other poultry people who have battled mites that they have used them on poultry with no really harm to their birds. You can also use the Flea and Tick shampoo afterwards to wash your birds and then retreat with the spray after 48 hours.

It can take a couple of weeks to rid birds of mites. After the first 72 hours treatment of spray-wash-respray keep checking your birds every other day and use spray when you see mites for a 2 week cycle and that should break the cycle on the bird.

For coop treatment, strip the coop down and throw out all bedding that can't be washed. Wash in hot water with bleach.
Use a vacumn and vacumn out your coop and hit the nooks and crannies. Make sure to throw out what you vacumn out, throw it out away from the birds. Wash out any vacumn filters. Then use powder to dust.
I don't recommend putting down more bedding because you should vacumn again after 72 hours to get an gnats that have hatched out.

Personal opinion, I have tried the pest strips and have little success with them IF you already have Mites.

Oh yeah, one last thing, if only one bird shows mites in your coop, all birds in your coop will get them. You can try seperating infected birds from non-infected ones as it might work. My experience taught me that it's just best to treat everyone in your coop equally. Mites are the cockaroaches of poultry parasites so don't take them lightly. Where you find 1, eventually you will find more.

Vapona no pest strips all the way! How many you hang depends on how big your coop is. I don't think mine do much in the summer because the doors are open so much but they sure clean the coop out in the winter. my birds have wintered ssssoooooo much better since I started using them.

Fowler wrote:Vapona no pest strips all the way! How many you hang depends on how big your coop is. I don't think mine do much in the summer because the doors are open so much but they sure clean the coop out in the winter. my birds have wintered ssssoooooo much better since I started using them.

Good point. I have never tried using strip over the winter. I don't know why? I guess you kind of associate pest strips with summer use when bugs are out. I usually have my barn open when it's nice and while I find the strips do wonders on flies I had no success with lice.

My mite problem is recent and confined to my quaratine area in my home. Happened recently and am learning loads about the buggers. I've actually learned to appreciate how easy it is to control lice as mites seem indestruciable.

I will definately try using the strips in the barn over the winter and see what happens.

In my experience with mites, I had the No-Pest fly strips in my coops prior to getting the mites and when I brought in two birds with mites (unbeknownst to me as I didn't apply good biosecurity practices ) the strips were not enough to kill the mites, however, the No-Pest strips are effective as a deterrent if you don't bring mites in on other birds. You do need good ventilation in your coops as they are toxic and can hang them somewhat close to their roosts but not right over them. Also make sure the strip is not hung right in front of a ventilation hole rendering it mostly ineffective. But fresh air should always be passing through the coop year round as long as you have a no-pest strip in it and they need to be changed every 3 months. I hang one only in my 8 x 12 coop and two in my 8 x 24 coop.

It helps if you know what mite you're dealing with, with the chances that they are one of two of the most common - the Northern Fowl mite and the Red/Poultry mite.

NF mites prefer winter and live ON the bird 24/7 and they tend to cause the birds' vents to go scabby as well as that is where they like to hang out most of the time so that is where you'll see them day or night. Also look just above the vent under the tail or just below the vent. The long term consequences of them going untreated is scabs all over the body and a greasy foul smelling residue in the feathers of the bird. They have, I believe, a 7 day life cycle but the good news is they will die off within two to three weeks without a host to feed off of.

Red mites or Poultry mites live in the cracks and crevices of the coop, mostly around the roosts and go on to the bird at night only when they are roosting. If you can't see mites on the bird during the day, go in to the coop at night and with some white tissue, wipe the underside of the roosts and if they are these mites, you will have smatterings of blood on the tissue from the freshly fed, now squished mites. Their life cycle is similar to the NF mite but they can survive up to 8 months without a host to feed off of!!

Both types of mites, if left untreated, will eventually suck so much blood from the bird, the bird often develops anaemia, its immune system is weakened and they die.

So, if it's the NF mite, treatment is focused more on the bird and a little on the coop and if its the Red Poultry mite, more of the focus is on the inside of the coop. Where ever the mite live is what needs the most attention.

I have had the Northern Fowl mite. I also had an immune-suppressed bird in the flock (this is all in hindsight) and know that if you have a weak bird, it may be your greatest enemy because no matter what chemicals you put on the flock and how often (along with the coop), you will have a difficult time getting rid of the mites if you have a bird that cannot 'shake' them because his immune system is too weak to begin with. So you may have to make a tough decision and let go of that bird. As long as all your birds appear healthy short of them having mites, you should be able to rid the mites by first, rubbing a powdered product with 5% carbaryl in it - under the name of 'Dusting Powder' by Dominion Vet Labs or a product called Sevin: Insecticidal Garden Dust - all over your roosts and at the end of the roosts and then dust the birds with this product around their vents. We did this at night, in the dark, outside of the coops with headlamps and masks and a sock over the chickens head to keep them from inhaling the product. We then held the birds upside down, vent in the air, sprinkled the carbaryl powder onto their bottoms and 'fluffed' it in and popped the birds back on the roost (sock off ). We then repeated this 5 days later because of their short life cycle to kill any that were able to hatch after the first dusting.
You could also Eprinex the birds instead of dusting - .5cc (.25cc for bantams) on the back of their necks, feathers parted on their skin. I don't know if repeating with that product is necessary.

IF, after a few weeks when you check for mites again you still have them (and there is a very good chance you won't), then repeat directions above BUT bathe them first with flea and tick shampoo, followed by a blow dry. The bathing is just labour intensive, as you can imagine, so you only want to do it if you have to. But you should be able to rid them without. ANd happy to share how to bathe a chicken for mites if necessary.

Hey Sweetened.........welcome to Chicken Keeping 101. All of this experience will help you to become knowledgeable and allow you to help others who will come after you. Good luck. THis too shall pass. Hang in there.

Chicory Farm, you say you had the No PEst fly strips. Do you mean those curly, sticky things that flies stick to? That is NOT what we refer to when we say No Pest strip.

It has been my experience that a No Pest strip will indeed get rid of mites. Maybe not overnight since there are several generations of them waiting to hatch on your bird. But it will be a cold day in (fill in blank) before I ever fling another can of that powder around. Once it's in your coop, it is there for a long, long time, a fine dust you inhale everytime some goofy bird gets flap happy and raises a ruckus.

If it means stapling plastic over drafty windows, do it, but get those No pEst strips up, let them do their maginc for a week or better before you judge failure or success. I don't even have LEG MITES anymore!

But lesson hard learned is that NO BIRD enters the flock until it has been Eprinexed first and confinced for a week or better..even to go into a No Pest coop. The WORST lice I've ever had came as a gift...on a hen.

Hey Uno, I have the No-Pest strips. I knew when I said 'fly' something didn't sound right but they are what you're talking about. The official 'NO-Pest strip'. Perhaps it was because I had an immune-suppressed rooster but regardless, the strip was not enough and this was after 6 months of strip, Eprinex and Dusting Powder. In the end, that bird died, I bathed the others and treated one more time and they are gone and it better be for good.

I wonder if anyone else who knowingly had mites on their chickens and used nothing but the pest strip had success ridding them? I believe they will keep them away now, along with practicing the biosecurity/quarantine approach. Man, what a lesson that was.

Thanks everyone for all your help and advice.

By the descriptions, I think I have lice more than mites, but assume they are treated in a similar fashion. I've googled "Chicken Lice" in every wordage possible and can only find pictures of lice-egg infested feathers. I haven't spotted any of those yet, but I have been looking closely. The bugs they have on them, near their vents, are rice shaped but about 1/4-1/3 the size of a regular grain of white rice. They are wheat coloured with a darker, brown head and it looks like they may have a series of 6 legs but they are pretty small and fleshy-ish coloured, so not easy to tell.

Does anyone have experience in using Dico earth on these problems? From what DH and I have been reading, the dico actually sucks the moisture from the mites/lice/bugs and kills them on contact/shortly thereafter. Has this been the case for anyone?

Will th eno pest strips get rid of spiders inthe barn.

Sweetened wrote:Thanks everyone for all your help and advice.

By the descriptions, I think I have lice more than mites, but assume they are treated in a similar fashion. I've googled "Chicken Lice" in every wordage possible and can only find pictures of lice-egg infested feathers. I haven't spotted any of those yet, but I have been looking closely. The bugs they have on them, near their vents, are rice shaped but about 1/4-1/3 the size of a regular grain of white rice. They are wheat coloured with a darker, brown head and it looks like they may have a series of 6 legs but they are pretty small and fleshy-ish coloured, so not easy to tell.

Does anyone have experience in using Dico earth on these problems? From what DH and I have been reading, the dico actually sucks the moisture from the mites/lice/bugs and kills them on contact/shortly thereafter. Has this been the case for anyone?

I know many people who swear by it.

I some people have success with the no pest strips but my back ground in entomology makes me wonder how well they can truly work as there is not a real way to know the dose released into the air in the coop. Also what is the active ingredient in the no pest strips? Mites are not easy to kill as they adapt quickly with their fast reproduction cycles. If the dose of chemical from the no pest strips is too low to cause death of the mite they will quickly build a resistant population in the coop.

I use the dusting powder for the first defense and then I also use a liquid pour on insecticide with a different active ingredient than what is in the powder. Pour on's with withdrawals mean they stay on the bird longer and will be more affective with killing mites.

The more routes you can use to control mites the better. Dust baths have been used all through history and they relied on wood ash. I also add some dusting powder and peat in the dust baths.

Manual inspections of the birds is very important in controlling pest free flocks.

( Also what are the effects of long term low dose toxins from no pest strips on the flocks health)?

Hey k.r.l.

Didn't know you knew something about entomology. Maybe you can help me with this then?
Since CHB I brought Northern Fowl Mites home. Thankfully the only affected my quaratine area of 7 birds. I also believe I finally have them under control.

Here is the question. During the battle, I noticed how that even with treatment the mites seemed to bounce from one bird to the next. Of the 7 birds quaratined, only 1 has managed to not become infected. While I have dust baths down with DE mixed into them to help, the 1 bird prefers to bath in clay cat litter that has been used. I know
but when I catch her I get her out of there.

So I am wondering, do you think maybe the clay cat litter effects the mites somehow by either scrubbing them off or by killing them?

k.r.l, you are correct, we have no real way of knowing how much 'dose' is in the air. BUt I don't think anyone buys a No Pest strip as an exact science. YOu buy one in the desperate hope it will rid your birds/coop of the hideous little creepy crawlies. It's the same as gambling, there is no way of knowng the outcome, but you're sure hoping for a good one.

My experience, in my coop, on my birds, in my part of the country has been this Diatomaceous earth :utterly useless. Rotenone: good for 10 minutes then utterly useless and causes sore throats in humans, associated with human health risks. Eprinex: the mother of them all for parasites inside and outside birds, but only good if a follow up dose is given, user error/ignorance can render this treatment ineffective. No Pest Strip: praises to the chicken god, for three years or more there has not been a crawling beastie anywhere in my hen house, thanks to a No Pest strip!

As to long term health risks to birds...I put wee babies out in the hen house, none have died, none turn into genetic freaks, I practically never lose a chick. You cannot ask what the long term health risk to your flock is without also wonder what the long term health risk of parasite invasion is. BOTH these things will compromise your bird. Which are you willing to live with? Chemicals in the air, of crawlers on your flock? There is no perfect answer here, you sort of have to pick your poison, so to speak.

I know of people giving their birds an occasional spray with Raid for feather lice. One spritz under each wing, on the back of the neck and in the fluff around the vent.

Hardly organic of course but apparently it works for them. I wonder if it would do anything for mites.