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How to Harvest Nightcrawlers

When you're a successful vermiculturalist, or worm-grower, invariably you begin to get more worms than you can handle. At the point when the nightcrawlers are nice and fat, you can harvest some worms for your friends or sell some off to interested novice worm-farmers or fishermen.

While you can certainly simply stick your hand into the worm bin and grab handfuls of worms as a harvesting method, this often makes the worms break. The harvesting method described here, on the other hand, means the worms are preserved better and you'll lose fewer.

Things You'll Need

Latex gloves
2 empty, clean shallow containers, such as plastic oil pans
Worm bin with fat nightcrawlers ready for harvesting
Scale (optional)
Travel container

Instructions

- 1
  Put on latex gloves.
- 2
  Take out the top layer (a few inches or so) of bedding from the worm bin and place it into the shallow pan. The nightcrawlers will be in this layer.
- 3
  Working in a bright area (either sunlight or artificial, but nowhere hot) to keep the worms under the bedding, pick out the bedding pieces from the worms. Keep going until all you have in the pan are worms.
- 4
  Weigh these worms, if you are selling, for example, a pound of worms. Subtract the weight of the empty pan to get the true weight.
- 5
  Place the worms into their travel container and replace their bedding on top of them to keep them moist.

Insects & Science