No red mites! Lots of eggs! Paint inside your hen house - WHITE !

Why did I paint the inside of my chicken house? And what's more I painted it white! How crazy is that?
Wouldn’t painting the inside of my hen house make it a nightmare to keep looking clean and neat? Strangely enough, I painted the inside of my hen house precisely in order to make it less work to keep clean and hygienic. And one of the main reasons for doing that is a little nasty called a red mite - Dermanyssus gallinae. And it drinks the blood of chickens!
Although each mite is less than 1 millimetre long, a severe infestation of red mites can drink up to 5% of your chicken’s whole blood volume each night. This constant and repeated blood loss makes the chicken hungry and weak from loss of blood as well as restless and itchy from the bites.
Every night after a blood feed one adult female mite lays a clutch of up to 7 eggs. Two or three days later the eggs hatch into 6-legged larvae. A day later the larva moults to a protonymph. The protonymphs emerge and search out your chickens as they sleep warm and unsuspecting in their hen house at night. Once they’ve had their blood feed, the protonymphs can continue to mature into deutonymphs and then 2 days later into the adult mites, which again seek out the blood of chickens in order to mate and lay more eggs.
In the warm months of summer, this whole life cycle from mite egg to 7 new mature mites can take as little as 5 days. If the weather is warm and there are enough chickens around for the mites to feed on, in just 12 weeks there can be 13 quadrillion mites – that’s 13 with 9 zeroes after it.
But you won’t find any mites on your birds. Red mites only come out to feast on their chicken banquet after dark. When night falls, the air temperature drops and the mites crawl out of hiding and up the birds’ legs, wriggle between the feathers, latch on for about 2 hours feeding on the chickens’ blood. When day breaks, they use pheromones to signal to each other that the sun is rising and the chickens are leaving the hen house, and they sneak away to hide in the crevices in your hen house. Their favourite place of all is under the perch where it’s attached to the hen house wall. This is why I never fix my perches permanently – I always leave them free so I can easily check underneath for even just a few mites, before they have a chance to multiply into thousands. And if the wall is white, it's easy to see any mites lurking underneath.
Plus White reflects and maximises the available natural light, which makes for a well-lit chicken house that the hens are happy to go into, and because the hens get the benefit of the maximum number of daylight hours between dawn and dusk, they lay lots of eggs without artificial lighting.

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