I went on holiday for a couple of weeks to come back and find one of my chicken houses was full of red mite! Not just on the ends of the perches but in every crack and crevice and in every corner. Red Mite are notoriously difficult to remove once they get a grip on a chicken house. When the weather is warm, red mite multiply very quickly and before you know it, you’ve got a serious infestation to deal with.

Dealing with a serious Red Mite outbreak.

So how do you deal with such a serious red mite infestation? Normally, for small numbers I would wash the house down with poultry shield and use a number of other red mite products here and there to kill off these unwanted visitors but with so many mites in the chicken house, more serious action was required. Here’s what to do:

Allow yourself a good couple of hours…

Cleaning the chicken house to remove red mites

• Clean out the house, remove all loose bedding material. Strip the house down as much as you can. Remove as many parts as possible including pop holes, automatic pop hole openers and anything else that will unscrew easily.

• If you have a felt roof, remove this – yes, unfortunately you will need to re-felt the roof. If you don’t you will find millions of red mites will still live happily under the felt.

• Using a high pressure hose / pressure washer, wash the house and parts down. Get the spray in every crack and crevice. This will take about 45 minutes if done properly. If you miss a crack, hundreds of mites could be hiding in there so it’s really important to ensure you get into everywhere possible. The spray will bounce back and soak you at times so wear old clothes and be prepared to get wet.

• Wait for the house to dry 10 to 15 minutes. Now look at it carefully – you should see red mites crawling around. These are the guys you missed that are coming out because they have been disturbed and are wet.

Spread generous amounts of Diatom on the bedding material.

• Go over the house again from top to bottom, again concentrating on the cracks.

• Repeat the above process as many times as necessary until there are very few mites coming out. The more you remove, the better. Even small populations can multiply quickly.

• Put your house back together. If you had a felt roof, leave re-felting until you are mite free for a couple of weeks. A temporary waterproof material should be used – plastic is ideal.

• Add fresh bedding material as you would after cleaning normal.

• Sprinkle a generous amount of diatom onto the bedding. The manufacturers recommend 500g per M2 which is quite a lot.

• Put a handful of diatom into your hand and rub it
  

  Diatom should be rubbed into perches

  into each perch, taking particular care around the ends and the underside. Whenyou have finished it should be white and smooth, like a gymnasts bar.  Red mites have to crawl over this to get to the chickens at night.

Monitor the house for a few days, particularly on perch ends and re-apply diatom to the perches every couple of days or as soon as it starts to wear off.

If you have got into all of the cracks successfully, you should notice a drastic reduction in the number of red mite in the house – if you still find reasonable numbers, make up a spray mixture of poultry shield and spray onto these areas using a hand held plant mister.

Continue using diatom for a few weeks until there are no more signs of red mite.

Click to see Diatom products on Wells Poultry

You will find an article on Red Mite with lots more information on the main poultrykeeper site, there are also other posts about Red Mite in my blog – (select ‘Red Mite’ in the Tag cloud to see them) including My Top 4 Red Mite Products

If you have any other tips on controlling red mite or would like to leave a comment then please feel free to do so below.

You can buy Diatomaceous Earth from specailist poultry product suppliers – for example Wells Poultry.

I usually buy a large tub around 2KG as shown to the right but I also bought a small puffer bottle / shaker that is useful because you can refil it from the big tub making it easier to apply and less wasteful.