Attention: from one louse to 16,000 in two months!

If you’ve got a single red mite in your chicken pen today, you will have 16,000 of them 60 days from now. Blood lice multiply at lightning speed. Today everything may seem fine, tomorrow you may have a sudden lice explosion. This is why it is so important to start treatment right away. The more lice, the longer it will take to get the population under control. But how quickly do lice really multiply?

1 blood lice lays 8 eggs a day!

Mature female lice lay 8 eggs a day if the temperature rises above 20 degrees Celsius. But they will start laying eggs at temperatures starting at 5 degrees Celsius which means the problem begins as early as winter. These eggs will not hatch until the temperature rises above 10 degrees Celsius. This is why they seem to suddenly appear in large numbers as soon as the temperature goes up. In reality, they had been there for weeks, months or even years. Eggs can hatch after as much as two years!

Various louse stages and their prevalence

Lice go through various life stages that determine whether or not they can lay eggs or suck blood. The eggs and larvae do not need blood yet and cannot procreate. Protonymphs, Deutonymphs and mature lice do feed on blood. Mature lice are the only ones who actually lay eggs. It takes about 6 – 8 days to get a mature louse from an egg (depending on the circumstances). Mature lice live for about 30 days which means a female will each lay 240 eggs in her lifetime!

Below you will find the various stages and the percentage of each stage present in the pen.

• Eggs: 35%
• Larvae: 10%
• Protonymph: 10%
• Deutonymph: 22.5%
• Mature blood lice: 22.5%

We explain all the stages individually because not everyone understands that part of the blood lice will not approach your chickens and part of them will. Getting blood lice under control effectively requires you to treat both the pen and the chickens themselves.

Blood lice multiply with a factor of 3.2!

Blood lice are extremely good at multiplying, doubling the population roughly every 6 days. Assuming not all eggs will grow into mature lice (only about 40%), one mature blood louse will still produce 16,000 blood lice after 60 days! Of course, there isn’t a single pen with just 1 blood louse. If you’ve got 100 lice, you will have 1.6 million of them after two months!

This extreme blood lice population growth is the reason why we always recommend to attack a blood lice problem immediately. The quicker you respond, the easier it will be to achieve results and the better those results will be. Place a blood lice tester underneath the perch and begin treatment as soon as the first blood lice appear.

Why a combined approach is necessary

As mentioned before, 55% of all blood lice present, will feed on blood. This means that 45% of blood lice will not feed on blood which means they will not yet get in contact with the chicken. Finecto+ Oral will attack the 55% that will. The remaining 45% consists of eggs and larvae that can grow into mature lice and restore the population very quickly.

By adding Finecto+ Protect Spray to the mix, you will attack the larvae as well. The spray will damage them to the extent that they dry out and can no longer ingest any blood. It takes a combined approach to kill the majority of the blood lice. It is almost impossible to eliminate them completely but you can keep the blood lice population under control.