too wet and too much rotting [anaerobic] stuff too close to the surface ... best way to avoid earwigs is keep the surface dry, and avoid woody material - maybe have a couple inches of shredded paper on top and fluff it frequently - will get rid of the BSF larva, unless of course, you like having flies in the house

once earwigs are around not sure it'll be easy to eliminate them - might try trapping them by putting a piece of corrugated cardboard on the surface for them to hide out in and get it outta there every day or 2

Bukk

The local worm expert here who got me going says they're 'residents in good standing.' As are potato bugs, some little black beetles, mites and other small creepy crawlies. They help break down the food so that the worms can eat it. The pincher bugs in my bin are about 1/4 inch in length or less. I know we have a species here in Hawaii that gets up to about 1 inch or so. I'm not sure I'd be thrilled to see those guys.

At first I thought I had babies of the species, but 6 months later they haven't 'grown up.' I ignore them and they ignore me. When I harvest the vermicompost, there are lots of them and other little things crawling around. I make sure to get all the baby worms out and ignore everyone else. (They're much too quick to catch anyway.) When the compost goes in to my plants, so do they. I live in a studio apartment and (6 months on) don't have any bug problems at all. I think that like the worms, they're not likely to leave their warm, dark, moist home for the great outdoors (or indoors as it is in this case ;-)

I do like to keep the mites down to 'here and there', not masses and masses of them. Keeping the bin a little drier than the sopping wet that it was seems to have solved that problem.

Thanks guys.

Forgot to mention, it is an outdoor bin, so I suppose I'm more likely to to collect bugs out there.

While the compost isn't sopping, it certainly is moist. I have been keeping a layer of cardboard over the top to keep it moist. Guess that's not helping the situation huh.

My bin right now just consists of broken down leaves, and a cantalope rind that I gave them a couple days ago. I suppose that's probably created a rather happy environment for them.

I suppose first step is to remove the cardboard I got on there, and air out the bin a bit. Hopefully some of them will abandon ship.

Susan - all those critters are a normal part of the decomposer community, but they are NOT normal for a worm bin and have no benefit for worms at all ... worms don't eat smaller pieces of material [broken up by bugs or otherwise], they slurp the decomposing sloppy surface of things and get the bacteria that are their primary food and that are the only decomposer that's vital to prepare organic material for the worms

Bill

If you want to get rid of them you can try Diatomaceous Earth. I wouldn't suggest sprinkling it all over the bin since it could irritate the worms but you could get some with an earwig attractant in it and bury a shallow tin of it (or a few tins) so it's even with the top of the bedding or anywhere that earwigs can crawl in but the worms won't come into contact with it. Most earwigs that stumble into it will be trapped and all that get the DE on them will die eventually.

It's hard to say how effective this will be at wiping out the whole population, but it'll put a dent in it for now.