Mites, hens not laying! Help please :-(

[Poddington Pea]

Hello, I posted previously about my mite problems and following the advice given, I creocoted the house. It seems to have done the trick, but now the hens are with holding eggs. We are getting the odd one, but in a week we've had 4 eggs from 8 hens!
I think the creocote smell and having been locked out of the house on a few occassions to allow me to clean out, fumigate and then to creocote have caused them to stop laying. It's worrying me, will they make themselves ill? Is there anything more I can do to help them get back to normal?
Thanks in advance for any tips.

[Falkirk Bairn]

When my girls stopped laying due to a mite infestation I added poultry spice to their feed, gave extra fresh fruit and veg and also fed them a couple of pouches of cat food a day to help build them up. They were laying normally within a couple of weeks.

[Nicos]

I wonder perhaps if they are run down caused by the mites sucking their blood? It'll take a time to recover from that.
Falkirk's advice re poultry spice and fresh fruit and veg is a good one ( not tried cat food though!)

[kathyd]

Mine also went on egg-strike PP, and are only just coming out of it now (3 or 4 weeks later)! I think, like you, they were sulking about being kicked out of the coop, and having all their separate cardboard nest boxes taken away and replaced with nice hygienic plastic ones. I have one older bird who's always suffered from repeated respitory problems so I was worried about the smell affecting her breathing, but she seemed fine. (She's now got the snuffles again, but it's so long afterwards I'm sure it's not related).

We also have 8 layers, but with one not laying now anyway (old age we suspect), one very determined broody (no cockerel, but they don't seem to have made the link...), one who does lay but rolls her egg out, putting a hole in the end, and then abandons it - we were down to 1 egg in a week! However.. when I explored under various bushes, I did find 2 separate stashes of eggs, so it wasn't that they weren't laying, they just weren't laying where I wanted them to! Do you have any potential alternative places they might be stashing them? Two of my lot had hidden them in the garden during their daily free-ranging time, little madams.

I also realised that where I used to have black polythene strips across the pophole and the internal nest box in the coop, I'd removed them of course to creocote, and not replaced them 'cos of the hot weather. So... shredded bin bags were put back, and lo and behold, 2 eggs the next day! I then put a plastic barrel with its top cut off and full of straw under the bush they'd stashed in in their run, and yay! Another egg! Plus a couple of them started re-using an existing plastic box which hasn't (yet) been interfered with. So I now get maybe 3 eggs a day on average, instead of the 5 I was getting before - but we're making progress! Ah - except I've now introduced 2 new pullets into the mix, so when I allow them to sleep on top of the coop with the others some time in the next couple of days, I'm eggspecting another with-holding of favours until things settle down again. Oh dear, worse than kids at times aren't they? .

[Graham K]

also fed them a couple of pouches of cat food a day to help build them up.

Hi,

not heard of that one before sounds sort of obvious, what type of cat food are you giving them?

[Falkirk Bairn]

Sorry for delay in reply as not been on for a while.

I use whiskas pouches to feed them up, just figured they could do with some extra protein.

My girls also love porridge in the mornings and some dried mealworms and the occassional sprinkle of suet (the kind you get for wildbirds).

[RichmondHens]

Filling up with porridge in the morning won't be doing them any favours. They need to come out in the morning and have protein, ideally layers pellets, which should form 99% of their diet. Save any extras till the end of the day. A more appropriate high protein treat would be a small handful of mealworms or chopped up hard boiled egg, again fed towards the end of the day.