Mite Bloom

This is what you can expect if the humidity in your worm bin is too much. Remember what I said about humidity making a mite-friendly environment?

When I was getting ready to feed the worms, I found this brown blob on the floor near the leg of the table under which I keep the worms.

Looking closely, I saw they were mites.

When removing the lid from the nearest worm bin, the lid crunched. Flipping the lid upside-down, I saw quite a few mites on it.

And there were mites all over the cardboard kept over the poop.

Fortunately, the rest of the bin looked normal.

As an FYI, some mites are expected in a worm bin. You'll see them in little clumps on paper or on food. This many though is sort of pushing it. Cut the bin down to a paper-only feeding regiment until the moisture is back to normal. The mite population will miraculously reduce accordingly.

Chuck's Questions

As promised somewhere on this blog, I'd answer any questions that have yet to be answered. Chuck posed a couple to me today.

What are the dimensions of one of my worm bins?

Every one of my bins is a 10-gallon Sterilite bin. Each is 12" tall, and across the open top, 18" long and 13" wide.

As Chuck has been closely monitoring the humidity in a see-through bin, he was concerned that it would be hard to determine the humidity in a dark bin.

It's obvious if humidity is too much. Any condensation on the walls of a bin is what I'd consider pushing the limit on humidity. This, for example, is excessive:

Here's a good time to insert a reminder that ventilation holes are an excellent way to circumvent this problem. While there are two rows of ventilation holes (larger holes up top and smaller holes an inch below those) in the bin above, they were drilled too low overall causing the lower holes to be useless as they are masked by the catch bin. Don't make the mistake I made on this bin. Remember that your stand-offs in the catch bin will compress with the mass of the materials in the worm bin and that mass will continuously increase as you feed the worms and thus, compression will increase over time.

Long story short: drill the holes as close to the top as possible.

When this much moisture is present, feed the worms a dry-paper-only regiment until the system is at more desireable moisture levels. High moisture isn't dentrimental to the worms as long as it isn't continued an extended period of time though you might find that the natural balance isn't as worm-favorable as it is mite-favorable.