The Bugs

Hello again!

There are just a hand full of problems that can occur in your worm bin, as I mentioned in a previous post.  Today, as promised, I am going to go into further detail on bugs in your worm bin. How they get there, and how to get them out.


If you refer to my Do's and Don't's list on my previous post you get a good idea of what types of food to avoid to prevent certain pests from invading your bin. However, even when sticking to the list you can get an invasion of fruit flies, which if you don't take care of promptly you can have a pretty nasty situation on your hands. If you are not careful you could end up with more flies than worms!!

I got my worm bin in April 2013 and started feeding kitchen scraps to the worms right away using methods I will talk about in future posts. Well, after about 2 weeks I noticed a fly coming out of the bin when I opened the lid. I ignored it, thinking that it must have just wandered in the bin and got stuck,  oh was I wrong... Fruit flies are a fairly common occurrence in amateur worm bins.

Every time I opened the bin from then on there were Fruit Flies that kept coming out! So I knew I had to get this fixed, and quick.  After doing some research I found a few different designs for some fruit fly traps. These traps involved some vinegar and some sort of funneling system to trap the flies in the vinegar. I thought this was interesting, but I didn't think it was the solution to my problem. If I just put out a fly trap the flies can still breed in the bin and live a long time and be a nuisance, and I didn't want that to happen.  So I came up with a fairly simple solution that worked well for me:

Every morning when I got up I would pick up my worm bin, take it the 10 steps outside my kitchen to my backyard and opened the lid!!! The fruit flies buzzed off never to be seen again. When I opened the lid I would fan the castings as to stir up the flies to get them out. After about 5 days of doing this the flies were all gone. I did it for a few days after just to make sure the adult flies didn't lay any eggs.

After doing some more research I came across some preventative measures that have worked ever since. If you have read my earlier post you can see images of the container I store my worm food in before I feed it to them. Once I have a full container of food for my worms I put it in the microwave for about 5 minutes. The heat from the microwave kills all of the eggs/larvae/flies that are in the container. After it cools I put the food scraps in the blender with some water and then pour the mix into my worm bin.  Another option in to freeze the food for 48 hours and then unfreeze the food and serve it to the worms.


In my next post I will talk about bin moisture content and remedies for it.

If you have anything you would like to add or if you have any questions please let me know in the comments below!

Thank you for reading.