Red wigglers need at at least 40-50˚F to survive. There's a few options though:
- Leave it be and let 'em die. The cocoons will not and they will return in the spring.
- Bring them inside or put them in a garage or similar place.
- Keep adding a lot of hot materials during the winter like
coffee grounds, which will start to hot-compost increasing the temperature.
- Find a place to put them in the ground, with an open bottom. They'll bury down deep
enough to stay alive.
- Add some kind of heater to your bin, heated
water in pipes (circulated by a aquarium pump) is best, but most anything will do — heat tape, soil heating mats, etc. They just need some areas to escape to.
- You can also insulate your bin (with haystacks/coolers or similar), but that works best so long as you continue to
feed the bins, so there's a heat source coming from inside. Really depends on your temperatures here.
Personally, I have a larger CFT bin and some soil-heating cable taped to the sides hooked up to a soil thermometer. I did this since I built the bin in the winter last year and didn't have enough material to keep it warm. I'm hoping this year the cables won't really be on that much. It's been getting down to low twenties at night so far, but the bin hasn't gone down past 68˚ yet. Larger bins tend to do better here as they retain larger thermal mass.
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