We are battling red mite in the poultry stables. We discovered it several days ago and have been spraying perches and nest boxes with dettol and then smothering everywhere with Diatomaceous earth. Diatomaceous earth is made from the fossilized remains of tiny, aquatic organisms called diatoms. Their skeletons are made of a natural substance called silica and when red mite crawl through the powdered earth, the mites’ bodies are sliced up and they then dehydrate and die. It’s not a nice way to go but then hundred of mites suckling the blood out of a chicken is not a nice way to go either!!
Creosote (now banned) is great for killing red mite but apparently one of its active ingredients is Chloroxylenol which is also found in dettol, hence using dettol as well as the Diatom
The life cycle of the mite is around 7 days and so in theory each time you see the adult red mite (red with the blood of the chickens and so obviously having fed), you must then assume that even if you were able to kill all the adults there and then, seven days later, their eggs could hatch out and you will have more. So you need to treat the problem every day for at least seven days (and realistically beyond that...)
In an ideal world, you would empty an infected house of chickens and move them elsewhere. We cannot do that here as we only have the stables so we are having to tackle the problem with the birds still using the stables at night. We are winning in that over the last few nights the numbers have massively reduced but eradicating the problem completely is going to take some doing though!!!