I had planned to write this nice long post about our No-Spending-in-November month, but after a day cleaning out chicken pens and bathing chickens, I just don't feel up to it. Yes, our chickens have mites. In fact, we seem to have a whole infestation of them. The chook pen was teaming with them, and they were jumping onto us and coming into the house with us. Took us a little while to figure out why we were so itchy, then DH walked in to collect the eggs from the chooks, and there were little bugs crawling all over his feet.
We've done many searches on-line, and of course, the most prevalent treatment is to bring out the insecticides. I'm not terribly keen on this, so we're going to try the organic route first. Therefore, we've spent the day pulling all the bedding out of the chook's shed, hosed the entire thing down with a high pressure hose, and then sprayed it all with a diluted solution of tea tree oil. Each poor chook was dunked in a tea tree oil bath, which they were not happy about. Though surprisingly not as bad as I thought they would be, visions of trying to bath cats floating in the back of my mind. Chooks are MUCH easier.
Unfortunately, though we have eliminated probably thousands of mites, there are still plenty left. Tomorrow we're going to lime the entire area, and the chooks, and probably keep them locked in for a few days. They must have caught them from the local birds, since they don't have contact with any other chooks or anything.
All our clothes are being washed in a hot wash, and we're all having several showers a day while trying to get them under control, because every time we go near the chooks/chook pen, they're all over us again. Lucky our tanks are full, and our hot water is free from the sun.
Hopefully, with persistence, we can beat this, and not have to resort to the nasty chemicals!
The mites that is. Thought we had licked them, but apparently we gave up too early. We're again scratching every time we go near the chicken pen, and tomorrow we'll be waging war on the tiny itchies yet again. This is a photo from last time, when we bathed the chickens in tea tree oil. Don't they look miserable? We probably won't bother with that again this time, as it was a lot of effort for not much reward. Dusting with sulphur, both the chickens themselves, and their nesting boxes and sleeping areas, is far more effective. Even more effective when you dust, then hose down the whole pen, letting wet sulphur get into all the nooks and crannies. And apparently you need to keep it up for a few weeks after you think they're all gone, to get the next lot of eggs that hatch out.
