Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

Almost exactly a year ago we wrote about the need to check the poultry houses for red mite!! Red mite are particularly unpleasant insects as during the day they hide under the cracks in the wood of the poultry houses and then at night they sneak out and suck the blood from the birds!!! Unfortunately the first photo is of red mite in OUR main poultry house, discovered this morning under the end of a perch when we were doing our usual daily clean!!
You can imagine that having their blood sucked out is not healthy for the birds and they can become quite poorly if red mite do this night after night. Their combs will become pale, the birds will become very lethargic and normal activities such as egg laying will stop. In severe cases they will even die!!
The good news is that we only found a few mite and those we did find were blitzed with products that hopefully will kill them - products that are safe to use with the birds around we might add!! Of course as they hide during the day we were unlikely to see many BUT when we checked this evening after dark we only saw ONE out and about!!!
It is three years since we had red mite in any of our houses and we have never had them in this particular house. They are terribly hard to get rid of and when we first had them we steam-cleaned the house, took it all apart, disinfected it, left it for several months and only then felt it was okay to re-build and use for the birds again.
We use two products to get rid of red mite: one is a specialist liquid poultry disinfectant and the other is a powder called diatomaceous earth - the latter is a completely natural product made up of the fossilized remains of diatoms which are a type of hard-shelled algae. Both products work in a similar way: red mite have a hard waxy coating on their bodies, the disinfectant dissolves this coating whilst the diatomaceous earth cuts into it. In both cases the red mite dries up and dies!! (Sorry!!)
We use both products even when we don't think we have red mite in order to prevent or discourage them, the diatomaceous earth being particularly good as you can sprinkle it everywhere (a bit like talcum powder) and it sticks in all the nooks and crannies that red mite love, HOWEVER, it is easy to miss places and it does eventually disappear as it falls into the bedding (which gets replaced) or wiped away as part of the daily cleaning. We should have made sure the ends of the perches (where they fit into a slot to keep them in place) were better covered... Our fault!!
Hopefully if we spray where we can see the mite and be generous with the diatomaceous earth we will get on top. We don't want our birds to suffer but to retain their lovely red combs (photos two and three) and keep laying eggs!!!