The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Poultry & Waterfowl => Topic started by: Bramham Wiltshire Horns on December 18, 2014, 12:55:08 pm
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Anyone use this or recommend it dos it work against red mite!
How do people use it
Thanks
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Yes, it does seem to work, but it takes time. We dust it on the birds (for feather mites), or make it into a thick mud and paint it onto perches, in crevices etc for red mite.
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I've only been keeping hens since April and haven't yet had a mite problem but I use DE anyway. I sprinkle it on the perches and in the nest boxes as a preventative.
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I don't really know whether it works but a I try! I've had lots of red mite this year anyway and then only sure fire killer is creosote. DE is supposed to break the lifecycle somehow - it's so fine it gets under their shell or something - rather than killing them straight away. I sprinkle it liberally around the house - under the bedding if it's preventative or if I've got a house that has a definite problem, I clear out all the bedding and just put DE in on the floor, perches, nooks and crannies, wherever I can get it to stay (normally as a holding procedure whilst I juggle houses so that I can move the chucks out and creosote).
H
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I was very doubtful about DE as it was a bit of a fad thing. However we tried it and it does seem to work, perhaps more as a preventative than to kill them off. So we use the weed wand to blast any mites which are living, then douse birds and house, perches etc with DE and repeat regularly. If there's time, we creosote one house and leave it shut up for a few weeks til it dries properly and doesn't harm the birds.
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I use DE after I was struggling with red mite and it seems to keep them at bay. I bought a separate 'puffer' which then allows you to make a large tub of DE powder last a long time but it also distributes the powder evenly and quickly in the coop which when it's windy (I'm on a Welsh hill) is a definite benefit as before the puffer I seemed to end up wearing much of the powder ;D
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DE is supposed to break the lifecycle somehow - it's so fine it gets under their shell or something
My understanding is that it is very sharp / abrasive at a microscopic level. That means it abrades away the protective (wax I think?) that covers the mites, then they dehydrate and die. Well that's what I read anyway!
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I bought in a lovely secondhand converted shed but when I got it home discovered it was covered in mite!! ( strangely enough the previous owner denied all knowledge???!! I gave it a liberal coating of creosote on the inside first, then the outside and shut it up for a month till the smell had gone. I now use DE as a preventive and, touch wood, no further problems. I know creosote is a faff, but it seems to be the way to go for me
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There was a big scare over the Summer with the use of diatom. It is a silicon product and people using it were being exposed to very high levels of dust. This could lead to silicosis apparently, so I didn't buy any and on advice tried ant powder. The ant powder contains permethrin which affected the bantam chickens badly, appearing to destroy their immune system to the extent that two of three in that coop died and the remaining hen was ill for months. The ant powder didn't seem to work on red mite -they were nesting in it!
I would say diatom needs to be applied as a wet paste and never as a powder. We are also creosoting but the red mite are only stopped for a season and will still cross the stuff when it is dry. They then live in the bedding which needs to be frequently changed.
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Wow, you're absolutely right Chris - the Materials Safety Data Sheet (http://www.advancedminerals.com/pdf/msds/2303.pdf) has been updated since I last bought any, and the exposure limits are WAY down on what they were before. It's now 0.025 mg/m3, whereas I'm pretty sure it used to be 10 mg/m3, which is just a typical level for a non-hazardous nuisance dust, so a simple dust mask would have been ok. Here's an older MSDS (http://www.domyownpestcontrol.com/msds/Insect_Dust_msds.pdf) which backs up my rememberance.
So, if I was specifying an industrial system to handle DE, I would now have to recommend a downflow booth with operator barriers for this, along with a personal respirator or high quality dust mask (selection chart here (http://extract-technology.com/_images/strategy-pyramid.jpg) if anybody's interested. [25 micrograms per m3, divide by ten once more for safety puts you in band D, with an exposure potential of EP1 or EP2, so you're most likely in the green region of the chart].
Of course that's for charging the material into a chemical reactor. If the operators were having to apply it repeatedly to flapping chickens, I might have to rethink that! ;D