There's always hope for the casings! Go through the castings and look for tiny, shiny beads. The color might vary from cream to mahogany. Set up a "hatchery" (mine is a plastic take-out food container with a lot of holes in the top) and toss in any eggs that you find. Good luck!

Back and I'm glad I put the worms in the ground as I heard we had some 100+ F days.

They are doing really well in their hole in the ground! Makes me think how unnatural it is for them to live in a plastic bin and wondering how I can figure out how to get the best of both worlds-the natural insulation and drainage of the ground with ease of harvesting of castings.

Probably can't be done or one of y'all would have figured it out and we'd all be doing if.

Bentley over at redwormcompisting.com figured to do it by just creating the castings where he wants them, and skipping the harvest step completely. He dug trenches alongside where he was to garden, filled them with bedding and food, added the worms and cover, and let the roots and worms do the rest, pretty much.

My approach isn't substantially different from mendopete. Let 'em live in a big old compost pile, keep it moist and covered, and leave 'em alone.

I can add that in my experience - very cold climate in winter - native compost worms do just fine. A big enough pile and access to ground seems to be enough. They can't do much in the extreme cold but they always reappear.

Thanks guys, you've given a lot of good tips/ideas. For now I've split the herd and am running an indoor/outdoor experiment.

I do need to work on that security issue, a lot more creepy crawlies in there, nothing that will eat the worms yet just some unsavory critters looking for a free meal.