When I harvested my 18 gallon rubbermaid tote, I got about 40 lbs of VC. I put this in a tote and over the next 2 months, my wife and I pulled over 100 baby worms out of that tote. We started calling the tote "the incubator" because of all the babies in it. We used a screen and cow manure to gather up the babies. You may want to try it.

Steamyb, Do you think you can elaborate how you use screen and cow manure to gather up the babies?

Sure, The VC was in the tote and I laid a piece of fabric screen on top of the VC. Then I spread Black Kow Brand (although any pasteurized manure would work, I just use Black Kow cause Lowe's carries it and the EFs love it) manure on the screen and spritzed it till it was wet. Every other day or so, the wife or I would scratch in the Black Kow and pull out the baby worms and when we lifted the screen some would be hanging on the bottom. We consider ourselves to be vermiculturists more so than vermicomposters because we fell more responsible to the worms care than to the uses of VC or perhaps even the reduction of landfill waste.

I might try the flow through system sometime...I'm doing the burlap harvest at this moment and it's quite a pain, especially when the worms refuse to move down. Perhaps I'll try the method where the worms are required to move up into their new bin instead of down.

I have a home made stacking bin system made from Rubbermaid bins. I put the second "tray" on 7 weeks ago. I still have a lot of worms in the lower bin. I may resort to screening the compost and pulling out the worms.

One thing I noticed in my lower bin is that there is about an inch of barely decomposed bedding at the bottom of the bin. That appears to still have a lot of worms in it.

Yea mine too, full of newspapers rotting vegetables...it smells a little like stinky cheese and a little bit of rotten fish. I'm letting the vermicast rest in the burlap for a while and see if they move down. I'm thinking this process might take a week since I have a very large amount of worm casts

takadi are you making use of light to force them down also?
I scooped off a few handfulls every once and a while the last wiggly mass I tossed back

I to will be working on a flowthrough type probly 55 gal barrel

A lot of our worm bins are big black tubs normally used to mix cement. When it is time to separate the worms from the castings, we prepare a cleaned out tub with new bedding material. We then place a hard metal screen with small oval openings (the kind that you put at the bottom of a screen door to protect the screen) over the new worm bin. Now we start transferring the worms and castings on top of this screen. A light above this speeds up the process. The worms crawl down to the new bedding as we take off the castings from the top.