Poultry Litter Beetle: Silent Killers

Litter beetles

Litter beetles are those dark beetles you find in poultry houses, most especially in deep litter houses. They normally hide under everything – drinkers, feeders, stones, laying boxes that are on the floor, along the walls etc. In my early days of raising chickens, I totally ignore these beetles because I thought they were harmless. But are they harmless? They are VERY harmful!

Litter beetles

 

Litter beetles eat chicken feed, their larvae bore into insulations, woods etc, they climb into poultry feathers and bite them, sometimes killing weakened chickens and worst of all, they can carry a lot of poultry diseases!

 

The scientific name for these little destroyers is Alphitobius diaperinus. Locally, they can also be called darkling beetles, lesser mealworm, black beetles etc. They cause more problems in houses where the litter is allowed to build up without any effective control program in place.


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Serological Monitoring for Egg Layers: An Effective Way to Determine Effectiveness of Past Vaccinations

If you buy egg layers as day old chicks, it will take about 4-5 months before they start laying eggs. During this period when they are unproductive, they’ll just be consuming feed without putting some money in your pocket or eggs on your table. The only gain you might get is from the sales of feed bags or manure. From day old to 5 months time, one layer can consume about 9.3kg of feed. So you can estimate feed cost from that. There are other costs such as vaccination, transportation, electricity, drugs etc. The fact is that you’ll be spending money.

Now what if after you’ve spent so much money and those young birds finally start laying eggs and they suddenly start getting sick? You may have some pullets (young egg layers) that are doing great, but once they start laying you notice that diseases started coming up and mortality
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