Lisa, Well, I have tried the light on, the light off, etc. and the only difference I see is if the light is on and the sun porch door is open, bugs are attracted to the light and the bat is attracted to the bugs. I wouldn't even care about the bat if it wasn't for the fact that they carry rabies. You know, it would be just my luck to have the bat become rabid and the cats find the bat, etc. The cats have had rabies shots but who wants to deal with a potentially rabid bat? We've had bats flying around our property in the evenings ever since we moved here and I love having them since they eat tons of insects, but this is the first time I know of that one has tried to take up residence in our house. We have every kind of fly outside that you can imagine, so I guess soldier flies wouldn't gross me out, though their larvae would. When Chris was younger and in school and they had to do an insect collection for Biology, he and a bunch of his friends could get all the insects they needed by visiting my garden and our back porch, which was just a screened-in porch back then. I remember they'd catch a bunch of stuff and put the insects in ziplock bags (one bug per bag) and put them in the freezer to kill them. We also occasionally caught and "saved" bugs for the children of Tim's coworkers who lived in beautiful, "tidy" city neighborhoods where everyone sprayed for bugs and kids had a hard time finding enough insects to do their insect collection. The kids were amazed at how many different kinds of flies they caught. Sometimes they'd call me and say "hey, this is a rare and endangered species of fly....am I going to be in trouble for having it in my collection?" I was shocked that any fly species was rare or endangered since we have about a billion of them per acre here. Okay, that's an exaggeration....maybe a million per acre. I always told them to ask their teacher and, as far as I know, none of them got in trouble since you cannot possibly know before you catch a fly that it is going to be one considered rare or endangered. Their favorite ones were the gigantic horse flies that are larger than the big black-and-yellow bumblebees. During the years all those insect collecting kids were working on insect collections, I almost hated to open my freezer door because inevitably there were zip-lock bags of frozen insects in there. I remember thinking "If we die suddenly and someone has to clean out that freezer, they sure will wonder about the bags of insects, won't they?" Moni, Hope the bike ride was fun and welcome home! Sheila, I agree that if 18 year-olds think you are strange, there you are just perfectly normal. For me, the fun thing is that by the time they are 22 or 24 or 26 years old, they finally realize that you were a cool and wonderful person all along and they cannot even remember why they thought you were strange! It is funny how we old fogies became cool and appreciated more and more as our son and his friends got older. I had to laugh this summer. Our son always has appreciated having a garden for fresh produce and enjoys most of the stuff I can, though I cannot get him to appreciate home-canned catsup. He is a professional firefighter and he works 24-hour shifts, so they cook a lot of their meals at the fire station, and he sometimes takes in home-grown produce or home-canned food to go with their meals. Still, I've always thought that he sort of thought his gardening- and canning-obsessed mother was a relic from the dark ages. So, anyhow, this summer he mentioned that some of his friends have taken up gardening and canning and were having a ball, and had given him some of their home-canned food to take to work. Suddenly, I was even more "cool" and in-sync with his adult friends than ever before. I just grinned. It is fun when you get to make the transition from weird to cool. lol Dawn

Hi there MHERRON2213! It normally takes between 3-6 months for the worms to migrate and really should be a min of 3 months to allow as many of the eggs to hatch for the babies to move up. (assuming you are wanting to increase worm population) Ensure any larger or un-composted materials in the 1st bin are transferred to the 2nd bin along with a handful of the compost from the first bin. ( I've found this helps get the second bin started.) Also remember that it would take at least a week or 2 for the bin to inoculate before the worms would move up and then they will retreat after a feast for a bit until their new home is the way they like it, No matter how long you wait though, you will never have 100% migrate up. If waiting on cocoons to hatch is not a priority and you just want to transfer them to the next bin.. place the 1st bin on top of the 2nd bin and then shine a light over the top of it. Every 10 or so mins.. scrape away about an inch of the compost with your hands and the worms will keep going deeper and eventually into the new bin at the bottom.. This will only work if you have holes in the bottom of the 1st bin. If you don't have holes in the 1st bin.. place a garbage bag over the 2nd bin (just a single sheet of it) with several holes in it and then place several handfuls of compost on the bag at a time. Simply use the light method until you have scraped away all the compost.. the worms will then go through the holes in the bag and into the new bin. Takes approx 1 -2 hours depending on how long between scraping off of the compost. Hope this helps :)

Worms will eat what you feed them. Try to remember that in the wild they tend to be small so that they can survive on less food. When some animal walks by and drops the "motherload" on their location, they will gather at the location for a feast. Proximity to other worms triggers breeding and a central food source will result in new worms. They will gain size rapidly so as to store energy in their body and they will make use of the excess food to produce more offspring. When the large pieces of food get used up, the fat worms won't be able to sustain their size and will begin to starve. They are now too big to fit in the small gaps of soil to hide or find bits of decaying matter below. They will starve to death and because of this, they will reproduce for the rest of their lives. The resulting offspring will not have excess food, so they will remain small so that they can maneuver through the topsoil and eat dead roots/leaves and whatever else they can find while waiting for the next cow pie or whatever. Worms can go their whole lives without getting to the assumed normal adult worm size though they will have every other aspect of an adult worm and be ready to grow large when the conditions are right for that. So what this amounts to is that if you suspect you have 2# of worms, you can give 2# of food per day or per week or per month if you wish. Worms use death as a survival mechanism and as long as they have enough time to pull off a few rounds of emergency breeding, they are harder to accidentally kill than most people think. The growth of a worm is a one way trip though. They can get big and fat when conditions are right, but the only way for an individual worm to shrink to a less hungry size is to breed and get out of the way for its offspring. As long as the bin is not too dry, you can theoretically do some amazing worm tricks by feeding way too much and then stopping feeding for long periods. I try to give my worms everything I possibly can without buying anything specifically to feed them or diverting something to them that could be used for something better. For example, if I don't want to eat bread loaf ends I'll feed them to my dog but I get over 2# of free junk newspapers per month that I use as worm bedding. Colored cardboard and newspaper is supposedly not harmful like it used to be in the olden days because it's understood that it generally gets landfilled and leaching into ground water is verbotten* within the current time period... also, in the '70s legislation* was put in place to prevent anything that may be mouthed by a reasonably parented child from containing harmful compounds. If newspaper and cereal boxes don't say "keep out of reach of children" it's likely that they don't contain lead or other toxic compounds and I put them in the bin. *I'm speaking specifically about the USA. Most countries have environmental protections that meet or exceed US standards. Some countries may not have standards, or items that can be standardized, or may not enforce their standards.

no there aren't 2 different, the white ones are from some bug that's one of the many critters of the decomposer community Bill