How to: Treating Chickens with Mites and Lice

Preventing and treating Mites and Lice efficiently is essential for keeping backyard chickens and poultry.  Mites and Lice can affect the health of your poultry in a number of ways if left untreated, you can have reduced egg production, loss of weight, an increase in disease susceptibility and reduced food intake.

 

To prevent infestations keeping your poultry bedding fresh and clean is a great way to start, avoid using straw for bedding as mites and lice find this especially attractive due to its hollow nature, we recommend Woodshavings, Lemongrass or Anistraw (made from sugar cane leaf).  The Lemongrass is also great to mix with other bedding as it has natural insect preventative properties.  Sprinkling Diatomaceous Earth (Fossil Shell Flour) under your fresh bedding will also help prevent infestations.

 

But what to do once you have an infestation?  The first thing that needs to be done is to move the Chickens out of the coop and then dispose of all the infested bedding material.  Once that has been done then you can treat the Chickens, you can do this by either drenching the Chicken in a Pyrethrin based solution much like Fidos Rinse Concentrate, or dusting the Chicken with a powder similar to Pestene Powder.  Both these products can be used in the coop before laying out new bedding, the liquid pyrethrin solution can be put in a sprayer and sprayed throughout the coop leaving a residual effect for a few days and the powder can be sprinkled around the coop.

 

It is highly recommended to treat again in two weeks to break the lifecycle of the insects.