Worm Suicide

I was being harrassed by the Office Skeptic last week (nothing new there).  He was complaining that I hadn't written about the worms.  It has been all chickens, all the time. 

It's not like I have been ignoring the worms.  I look in on them daily.  I find they like banana peels the best of everything I've put in there.  Any time there are banana peels, I know where the majority of the worms are. It's a big gross looking pile, but kinda cool, too.

Also, I was way premature and added the second level onto the worm bin.  I thought I could move one of the banana peels with all the worms to the upper floor and they could start to work up there while the rest finished working downstairs.  Wrong.  All the worms decided to move upstairs.  Not sure why, but they did.

Anyway, over the holiday weekend (Friday I believe), I noticed dead worms on the table and floor around the worm bin.  I figured when I took the second layer off to check on the bottom layer, that some may have fallen through.

I picked up the dead, dried worms off the floor and went about my business.  I checked back later that night and found more worms on the floor.  I got to these ones in time so I was ble to put them back.  The next morning, I went about fixing the problem.  I found that on the edges of the lower level, between the newspaper and wall of the bin, there were hundreds of worms that got stuck during the great migration north.  I'm not sure how or why they got to wehre they were - no dirt or food - but there they were. 

I went about moving all the worms from the lower bin, setting new newspaper in there, so the paper went up over all four edges.  I got them moved back in, new shredded wet paper over them and some fresh veggies to go with them.   I would go in and check on them every couple of hours to see if I missed anything and whether there were more suicides.  All seemed right in the world.

Until last night.  There were a number of little dried worms sitting on the table this morning.  Didn't have time to look into where they are getting out, but I'm hoping there aren't more when I get home tonight.