I have been looking through your blog, but did not yet find any questions about small white larvae in the composting stuff. I have had my worm bin for about a year, and my worms are alive, but I think just barely. It is a wriggly ranch 3 layer bin, and in the bottom layer, with the spigot, there is alot of what I think is worm poop, which is quite damp, but with no standing water, with some worms crawling around here and there, and a lot of very small white wiggly things I think are maggots of some very small fly. It does not smell bad, but those white things kind of gross me out. In the bin just above where I put food, there is more worm poop, food that is being worked on by worms, and again, alot of those icky small white things. No more newspaper or other bedding is still there. Should there always be paper bedding available for the worms? And how do I get rid of those white things? And when do I get to put the next layer of the worm bin into place?
Thanks,
Susan

Hi Susan,

What you are describing as larve are probably potworms. At first I thought you might have been describing soldier fly maggots (Also white, but nobody describes them as maggots of some very small fly). Regardless, Potworms and Soldier flies come when conditions are starting to break down for the worms. Sounds like your bin has far too much moisture in it, and likely too much food for the amount of worms, and not enough beddding material.

You always want a nice thick layer of paper in your bin. The more, the better. It is your buffer between the rotting vegetation and every flying bug in the state. The only time you should let your bedding run low is when you are about to harvest your castings. Then you will add bedding to the next tray up, along with fresh food. The worms will follow the food. Understand, it takes a good month for most of the worms to leave their old bedding.

You can get rid of the white things by getting conditions in your bin less wet and acidic. Stop feeding the worms for a bit and just add a bunch of dry shredded paper of cardboard. It will wick up the excess moisture. Without a wet, acidic environment, the bugs will go away. The worms can live off the paper for awhile.

Because muddy castings are hard to work with, I’d add the paper for now. When the worms process it all, and you no longer recognize the paper….add your next tray filled with damp shredded paper and buried food scraps.

Do you have a piece of weedcloth lining the bottom of your bottom tray? It works well for letting the water flow through, but not the worms. It will leave much less mud in your base.

Hi Jerry,

I went through the coir fiber and retrieved a few hundred cocoons to put in my single tray with all of my Euros. If you remember I had some pretty mucky compost ( not all of it but some). I shredded up newspaper for the bottom of the tray under the compost, and shredded newspaper for above the compost in the tray so the worms and compost are surrounded by bedding. There is no manure, just composted leaves and garden plants plus 1 apple, a green pepper , a few rotting pole beans and a banana peel. Anyway, when I added the cocoons I noticed the material was warm! Do the worms generate their own heat? I have composted for 20 years now and I have never seen material like that heat up, it was already pretty well broken down. Maybe the castings from the worms are high in bacterial activity? Is the ink from the newspaper ( Washington Post ) harmful? Someone told me the newspaper ink is made from soybeans, is that true? I see online a lot of people use newspaper for bedding since it is so convenient. Thanks Jerry.

Hi Jason,

The answer is much simpler than what you were thinking.    Worms do not generate their own heat (Cold blooded),  the castings did not create a problem here, and the ink  not a problem as it is soy based.

What you are experiencing is the nitrogen release in your scraps. You may not have noticed it before depending on the amount of food you put in, or the amount of nitrogen in the scraps you put in.   It’s one of the reasons I always recommend pocket feeding only.  If you have food throughout the bin, two catastrophic things can happen:

1.  The bedding may heat up…creating excessive bedding temps for the worms  (This is what you experienced when you put your hand over a hot spot and felt the bedding heating up. 

2. The bedding can sour.  You can create an environment too acidic for your worms. 

Garden plants=High Nitrogen (Probably best composted in an outdoor compost pile).

By themselves, rotting green beans are usually not a problem, but when aded to high nitrogen garden plants, they have the potential to contribute to the heat your are experiencing in your bin.

Basically, even though you may not have a lot of food in your bin (I’m just guessing here), the food you put in your bin is the equivalent of a couple of matches.    Depending on the size of your bin, and whether or not the worms can get far enough away from the hot spots, you may want to remove some of the warm scraps for now.