Featured Customer Question – Don H.
Jerry – haven’t talked in a while. My farm is doing fine, but last week when I was about to do a feeding I removed the worm level and the level underneath (the drip level) had about eight kazillion little (1 – 2 mm) white critters wriggling around on the bottom. They don’t appear to have legs, and they certainly don’t look like what I imagine a baby worm looks like. Could they be micro-maggots of some sort? Anyway, I gave a cursory shot at cleaning them out, but a week later they were back in force. They don’t appear to have gravitated upward into the worm salon. Any ideas?
Don
Hi Don,
What you are looking at are white mites. They won’t harm your worms, but indicate conditions in your bin are getting overly acidic. (I’m going to take an educated guess that your bin has too much food/liquid in it for the amount of worms you have. I call this the beginning of a swamp. 
It often goes hand in hand with a stinky bin.
It often goes hand in hand with a stinky bin.Stop feeding and watering your worms for a bit. Add a bunch of dry newspaper shreds on top of your bedding. The shreds will soon suck up the excess liquid and become good worm bedding. When conditions stabalize, pocket feed your worms, only giving them the amount the can eat in a couple of days. The worms can live quite awhile this way, but the mites like it damp and acidic. When conditions no longer favor the mites, they will “Disappear”.
Tags: help with worm bins, help with worm farms, mites, worm bin problems, Worm Farms
December 8th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Hi Don and Jerry,
I used to be plagued with overly wet worm bins and almost lost my worms a couple of times. Then I got a couple of ideas from talking to people and further thinking about the problem.
For two years now, I have put an eighth inch unshredded but wet paper layer immediately above the food layer. This can be any kind of paper not printed with glossy ink but I especially like inner toilet paper rolls, black and white news print, unprinted bulk food packaging, and paper egg cartons. Soak the paper in a bucket of water for an hour before use. Do NOT shred and no need to tear. Then I add at least four inches of DRY leaves or pine needles on top of the wet paper. Shredded paper can work too but leaves work best. This material is there for two purposes, to absorb moisture from the bin, and to minimize fruit flies and mites (which aren’t harmful to the worms but cause emotional problems for their human caretakers). The leaves do eventually become wet on their own and start to decay. The worms then go for them. So be prepared to add a couple of handfuls of new leaves each time you feed the worms.
I have two wood bins at home, a plastic demonstration bin, and a large wood bin at Full Circle Sunnyvale where this practice has been used. The worms are thick and healthy. No more paper shredding is required. And almost NO flies.
I am confident enough in this technique now that I teach it at compost workshops.
danh
Dan Hafeman
Full Circle Farm Garden Manager
Master Composter