The Bulk Worm Bed
As the fishing worms will have been growing in ideal conditions for three months and will have achieved sexual maturity at between two to three months, they will have been breeding for perhaps four to five weeks before harvest. Assuming that your grower bed produced 6000 fat fishing worms and that these produced capsules four times over four weeks, the bedding could contain some 24,000 capsules, with a potential to produce around 100,000 worms. It may even be that some of the capsules hatched. but the difference. between the hatchlings and your mature. worms will be so great that you will have no difficulty separating thetwo. Transfer all the Grower Bed bedding to your Bulk Worm bed, where the worms are allowed to grow indiscriminately. You can sell these in bulk, by the thousand or by the kilo. as Bulk or Bed Run worms.
The Bulk Bed can be a mound or fitted with sides, and after it has been established for three months, you should double the area every two months, by dividing it vertically and taking half the contents of each existing bed to stun a new one until you judge that you have sufficient for your needs.
An Alternative Breeding Technique
By this method you will produce capsules only and you do not put feed in your breeder boxes.
Cut hessian into strips the width of the Breeder Box and soak it in water for twenty-four hours, allowing it to drain well before use, You can then fan-fold it into the Breeder Box like computer paper and, between each layer, sprinkle about twenty mature worms. Keep folding and adding worms until your 1000 mature worms are all in the box. At the end of the twenty-one days, remove the hessian by gently lifting and unfolding and shake the worms and capsules into the bottom of the box as the hessian is removed.
You can use the same worms no more than three times in this method, after which they must be returned to a bed good feed. As you remove the hessian, a good many worms will be trapped in the weave. This doesn’t matter because the hessian is either going back into the breeder box, or into the R & R bed (after three uses) and eventually the worms will consume it completely.
The capsules can be gathered from the bottom of the box after the worms have been removed, put in a Grower Bed or kept in storage until sold or used You must be careful when handling capsules not to use your bare hands, but always to wear gloves. Natural skin grease will break the surface seal of a capsule, allow the penetration of moisture and render it infertile.
I do not use this method because it involves more work, and so time, than any other to achieve the same result.However,it is useful if you want to go into business selling capsules only. This is an avenue not explored at all in Australia so far, but is relatively common in America.
Fishing Worms From a Bulk Bed
In order to harvest fishing worms from your Bulk Bed, you will need to separate the immature. small-sized worms. There are two ways of doing this.
One way is to lay down 50 mm of soaked and drained peatmoss or normal bedding and cover it with fibreglass insect mesh. Then harvest the bulk worms, place them with their bedding on top of the insect mesh and light retract them as usual. As you chase the worms down, the smaller worms will be able to pass easily through the mesh leaving the large worms trapped above, so that you can harvest your fishing worms with a minimum of effort. You will still have to pick your fishing- worms out but, as they are mainly big worms, this is not so hard. (Don’t delay in removing your worms from the mesh because, given time, the big worms will move through it also.)
The second method is to use two screens, one of insect mesh, the second of a coarser material. For this used acoustic sheeting, which is zinc-aIumed metal sheeting perforated with 2 .2 mm holes The screen size is 600 mm x 300 mm x 50 turn deep.
Put the coarse screen on top of the Bulk Bed and fill it level with normal feed. Place the fine screen directly on top, once again filled with normal feed to which you have added a raw egg Cover with damp hessian and leave for twenty-four hours. You will find that all the worms have been attracted by the raw egg, but only the small ones have been able to move easily through the insect meshed so predominantly big veorms are caught in the coarse shed screen below. Simply lift the screen from the bed and commence light retraction in the normal way.
Once again, sorting will be necessary but, as before, you will be working mainly with big worms
Easy Sorting
The easiest way to sort worms is to sprinkle them liberally with garden lime or flour and mix them thoroughly in a bucket This sticks to their moist skins, absorbing the moisture, and the worms can no longer cling to each other making it very easy to collect the ones you want rapidly and to count them if you wish to do so. prefer to use flour 1.}(7eause, after the worms have been packed in moist peattrions, they can eat it and derive nutrition from it.
Blues for Bait
The reason you cannot use Blues to breed for you like the Reds is that their breeding and maturation cycle is not a predictable although generally far more rapid. If you had any in your original Bed Run supply from which you hand sorted your Reds, the Blues (and Tigers) should have been used to start your Bulk Worm bed - Allowed to grow, with plenty of room and good feed and care, your Blues will achieve a length of up to 200 mm in around six months. At that size they are worth 20 cents each as it is very difficult for fishermen to buy worths that big, To get the big Blues out, simply right retract (page fit) and roll your worms in flour as described above. It is Flier] fuss a matter of picking the big ones up as quickly as your fingers can manage it.
