If you had a bin with regular red wigglers in it, I would say no problem whatsoever - they wouldn't leave the bin just because it was bumped around a little bit. With your wild worms I'm not totally sure what to advise. I don't think temporarily bumping and jostling the bin would be a problem at all, but I wonder how the wild worms would like being confined in a trash can space for the whole winter. Without knowing what kind they are, it's hard to know how their natural behaviors would work out in an indoor bin - They may be coming and going freely right now, and if they're used to that, moving the can inside may turn out to be a problem.

Were you planning to leave the compost outdoors if it didn't happen to have some worms in it? I would be inclined to just let the worms move out of the bin when it gets cold, if they want to, since they didn't have any problem moving in. They must have something they naturally do in the wintertime. Their strategy may well be "lay eggs and die". If so, the bin will hatch a whole new herd in the springtime without you having to do anything. But it's also possible that the worms will just ball up in the very center of the bin and snooze all winter.

Thanks for the input, theparsley and armoured. I don't know worm species super well, but I am pretty sure these aren't red wigglers, unless red wigglers can get really big. The red wigglers I have experience with have been small - about 2-3 inches long and just 2-3 mm wide. These worms are night crawler size - 3-7 inches long and 3-5 mm wide.

i like the idea of possibly dumping the pile on the ground, although I will have to wait until the bears hibernate. I am not sure if the worms would have an easy escape route. I think I may have introduced them because I sometimes add a bit of native soil to the bin if it's seeming too wet. That said, they could get out through the drilled holes.

My one incentive in bringing the bin under the house is that it would stay warm enough to continue slowly composting through the winter, as opposed to going dormant.

You may be right about what kind - they looked small on my phone )). In seriousness they look quite red, and there are other types of composting worms. Either way, if they don't bother you and they're eating organic material, and they're 'local', they'll likely do fine outdoors and why change things up?. If they really are nightcrawlers, the access to ground may be more important to their survival, though, as some of those burrow. (Obviously there's more precise terminology about worms that tend to live in different parts of soil - I'm simplifying - but the worms don't care much about our terminology anyway).

I suppose if they're happily living all jumbled up in a compost barrel, they are unlikely to be a deep-earth-burrowing species of nightcrawler, though they definitely sound bigger than red wigglers. I would not be surprised if they found their way into the barrel through the drainage holes, and they could presumably find their way out that way too, although they'd have to do so when the surfaces were reasonably wet.

If you wanted to try them out in an indoor worm bin to do worm composting over the winter, maybe set up a smaller bin and put in a few handfuls of the worms to experiment with at first? That way you wouldn't have to wrestle that whole barrel inside, and you'd have a bin where the bedding conditions were easier to control.

I wonder, could they be European Night Crawlers? ENC

They can tolerate lower temps than EFs but I would still avoid to get them frozen, you know, just in case.

They look like big, fat redworms, to me. If you live where it gets below zero, the closer to the house you can keep it, the better. Under the house near a source of warmth sounds pretty good, especially if you can keep it from freezing. If it's dry where you keep the bucket/bin, the worms won't be too interested in going wandering as long as conditions in the bin are otherwise good.

I've kept buckets of worms in my back room closet with no problems at all.

When we talk about "moving" worms, we're not really talking about moving the bin around from here to there. Yes, worms probably wouldn't like living long term in a bin on an 18 wheeler where there are constant vibrations, but moving a bin from one house to another shouldn't be a problem. You could probably even divide them up into smaller buckets to fit a space and they'd get over it pretty fast, if you don't otherwise change the bin conditions (add lots of new bedding, for instance).

There are at least 180 species of worms crawling around gardens in the US, so just because they are red in color doesn't mean they are Eisenia fetida. Not to belabor a point. What's important is how they would behave in a bin situation, which to some extent you already know because they are already living in one.

I'd add, if found in wild in Montana, we know they know how to survive the winter. We may not know how they do it, but they know how.

My wife banished my worm factory from the basement. I cried a lot; then I came up with a solution. I placed the factory in my unheated, enclosed storage shed and placed a root warmer heating pad underneath it. I also placed a small electric heater in the shed set to start at 35 degrees and stop at 45 degrees. Last winter my worms did fine although the level of work in the factory slowed to a crawl.

This is all great information, thanks everyone! I may try moving a couple of handfuls of the worms into smaller bins (I started this system out with 5 gallon buckets) and put those under the house to see what happens. Since we haven't lived in this house in winter, I don't know how cold it will get in the crawl space, but it shouldn't freeze; if it does we're going to be dealing with the much bigger dilemma of frozen pipes!

Anyone truly interested in doing what is necessary to keep them in winter. Either build a homemade one or invest in a commercial type . I for one keep mine in a factory 360 and indoors in a separate closet but they could be kept most anywhere without much of a problem. I for one want the worms to keep working 24/7 so I can have all the castings I can by spring for garden and plants.