I say normal. The cardboard will pull out some water from the nearby stuff, which is what you want. I get mummified peels and so forth, but a month later ... it's all compost.

Which is to say that there are often areas at the top of my bin that are too dry for optimal rotting or worm habitat. Coffee grounds, in particular, can dry to a fine powder. But it doesn't hurt anything and eventually the system absorbs it.

What an excellent world, in which we can have conversations with people we've never met about rotting garbage!

Worms do what they do, you can't herd them any more you can cats :P. So it's not uncommon to see them clustered in groups elsewhere while seemingly nice food sits empty. So long as your harvesting results make you happy it's all good however you get to that point.

Mummified peels sounds quite dry. Are you running with the lid off now. If so maybe you can try putting it back on to up the oveallr moistness of the bin (top layers) while hopefully with the airflow and bedding you won't be soaking the bottom. If the whole system is running drier at top now, yeah you probably will see the rotting process slow down a bit. But you might just have the worms working it a bit more from the bottom up than they did before.

Remember as you add stuff, things lower down will constantly be worked on. I see lots of cardboard and things like corn cobs heading down pretty much intact but so long as when it finally comes out it mostly gone, I'm happy.

As long as the worm are happy, I wouldn't say it's 'too' anything. Now's the fun time where you can slowly make tweaks and see how it goes.

BTW on a general note on moisture and bins. With a lid on, bins pretty much keep all their moisture inside. With it off it's going to be constantly drying out and losing moisture. But neither one by itself might be ideal.

So once you think you've got a nice amount of moisture in the bin you can put the lid on. With bedding and airflow (maybe a bedding pipe down to the bottom etc.) hopefully the water that always travels down will evaporate and/or wicked back up via the bedding to the top again. So you avoid standing water in the bottom and it's moist on the top. This would be your ideal.

If you add more moisture via food, with the lid on you might get to a point where you'll always have standing water again on the bottom and this will stay that way unless you add more bedding to soak it up, or dry out the system in some way (like removing the lid). So then you can remove the lid, then once you get the moisture level you want again you can return to having the lid back on.

So it's not always lid on or off. It can be used as an adjustment for your overall moisture.

the peel will decompose. i mainly find this happening with orange peels. banana peels often decompose faster and get eaten more since it's mushy and sweeter.

the behavior i would have to say normal i got my worms a week ago no problems with my worm bin besides heating up but i used cardboard and a lot of newspaper and all the worms love to migrate to the bottom portion of the bin. most likely they are eating food down their that i put during the first feeding. but when i open up the bin at night they are all on the top portions all crawling on eachother on the sides like they are mating. i highly doubt they are making as they do this daily since i got them. they are not trying to crawl out they just are at the surface doing idk.

if they are not trying to crawl out i highly doubt their is a problem. i have seen countless problems from too wet bedding, over feeding, not enough air,etc..

and from all those video's the worms tried to crawl out. the only logical reason i can think of why my worms go in during the day and come out at night is because i live in Hawaii and it's hot as hell the past week thus they stay in the bottom to cool down. at night it's less hot and so they come up.

my bin isn't that deep it's only about 6-7 inches deep so they will move throughout the entire bin since it's not too deep for them and mine is a little clumpy and matted from the paper but they don't seem to mind

I keep trying to herd my worms but I don't think they can hear me. Pointing out the relevant passages in 'worms eat my garbage' isn't working either. ;)

I have been leaving the lid off the bin in the daytime, replacing it at night in case the darkness incites escape attempts. I made some cardboard pipes out of paper towel rolls from bottom to top. My bin is only 8" deep. The top is a bit dry, yea. My worms did that too, Celbrise, for the first round of composting.

I'm encouraged that nobody's posted to panic wildly. I have no reason to suppose my worms are unhappy, even if I can't see them. I think I'll put the lid back on and see how it runs for a while. I'm not in a hurry to get vc, and I can stick scraps in my fridge. (Or outside, it's dropping below freezing already, brrrr)

I wanted to start feeding twice a week instead of once, but I think I'll back off to once and see.

And yea, the internet is great :)
thanks,
Ivy