Avoiding flies in a very small worm bin

This is my second year to keep worms in my first grade classroom. The first year I had a few "bait" worms in a plastic bin with fabric over the top. The kids loved spraying the newspaper to keep the "habitat" moist and occasionally adding their orange peals or carrots from their lunches. Everything was great until I got these little flies that I think ate fungus and also killed all of my african violets. I dumped all my worms and bedding near my compost pile and avoided worms for a year.

This year my kids were begging for worms so I set up a washed out coke bottle with about 4 inches of dirt & worms from my garden on the bottom & the rest filled with a mixture of moist newspaper, dead leaves, and a few orange peals. I poked holes in the container with a safty pin for air. I thought the holes would be small enough to prevent flies, but I was wrong. They must have been on the orange peals or layed eggs through the hole.

I left the cap open and the bottle outside for them to "fly away." Then I decided to introduce a "preditor" to eat the flies. I caught a lizard, which the class loved petting, and stuck him on top. I don't know if lizards eat worms, so I was thinking of replacing it with a spider.

If you have any ideas of what went wrong or how to fix it let me know. Maybe I should just start over again......

Does anyone have ideas for small but cheap worm bins for about a dozen worms that would alow the class to learn about vermiculture without the flies???
Thanks!

Are you having a problem with fungus gnats or flies, or both?

If you have gnats, they can be controlled with a BT solution like Gnatrol, which is safe for the earthworms. You could also put up a yellow sticky trap to catch the adults.
http://www.planetnatural.com/site/gnatrol.html

If you are having a fly problem, you may want to put some fine screening material around the worm bin.

Are you singing the FBI song from the Banana Slug String Band with your class?

Very funny! I will have to teach it to them.

The first time it was fungus gnats. I haven't tested yet to see if it is flies or gnats this time. The lizard didn't eat many flies this weekend. I may just start over. The flies haven't gotten out yet, so I am assuming the holes I poked were too small for them to get in.

garden_mermaid writes: "If you have gnats, they can be controlled with a BT solution like Gnatrol, which is safe for the earthworms." I had a problem with the link you provided, but I will spend some time researching the "BT" solution.

I have experienced the fungus gnats and occassional small flies, but never worried much about them since I keep my worm compost bins in the garage. However, I use the spent worm compost media (peat moss) as germination mix as well as a part of my potting mix.

Lately I have seen some very tiny white critters that appear to hop about in the upper layer of the worm bin media, which is where I extract the material I use for my germination mix. I'm not thrilled about bringing these critters inside the house where I keep my seedling flats.

This is a first for me. I have never seen these white critters in the worm media before. They seem pretty resilient to anything I've tried so far, such as ground up egg shells and 'baking my worms'. I have used the 120 degree oven method to sterilize the germination mix for pepper seeds, but I feel this destroys much of the benefits of using the worm media for germinating seeds. Thoughts?

Garden-Mermaid, Love the FBI song. To what music is it sung?

mraider, if you google Gnatrol or Gnats Off, it should take you some sites that sell a BT solution of fungus gnats. The gnats are usually black though, not white. I'm not sure the the white critters are. The BT may work on them as well.

Pam, if you go to the Songs for Teaching site, and click on the "Listen to this song" link, they have samples that you can play get an idea of what the songs sound like. We use a lot of these songs from the "Singing in Our Garden" CDin the environmental education programs as a local farm. The 3rd & 4th graders love them.

Water Cycle Boogie from the same site:

The lizard did take care of all the flies. :)