How To Keep Track Of Your Worm Population

I need to learn how to keep track of my worm populations. I have a shoe box sized bin that has had 80 worms added to it. I started with a 1 1/2" or so layer of sphagnum peat moss. I added 10 worms a day for 5 days and also added 2 apple cores, some strawberry tops and peels from one apple. I may have also added a small piece of papaya. All that's left is some remnants of peels and some of the cores. I have been adding 10 worms a day for the last three days now bringing my total added to 80. I am going to let them grow on their own once I've added 100. I have heard that worms double their populations every 90 days but I don't know if that's exactly true. There is a good article over at http://www.redwormcomposting.com/general-questions/will-a-red-worm-population-double-in-3-months/ that does a good job of explaining that it is very difficult to determine how fast someone else's worm population will grow.

I don't know if I should harvest all of my worms at one and weigh them or if I should just keep harvesting them 10 at a time and see if the population I am taking them continues to grow or if it gets difficult to find worms in my bin. I am going to have to decide how to track my inputs too. I do have a small food scale I could use to weigh how much I am feeding and I could see how long it takes a certain population to devour what I add, then see how many worms there are after a certain amount of time. I have noticed a bunch of small worms in my bins lately.

I want to do so much with them but I have to wait for them to do something. They need to reproduce and grow. That redwormcomposting.com site has tons of great information on how to compost your kitchen and garden scraps with worms. The guy who put that site together has written about tons of different types of worm bins he has tried out over the years. I've been learning a lot from his site. Google Drive has a spreadsheet that I can use to track my worm population. I started a spreadsheet there and I will post a link to it later, in the comments, when I figure out how to do it. Please help me figure out how to improve on it. So far I only have the approximate date I received them and the amount I received plus the date I should have double my original population.

I am going to add a column that will account for the amount I feed them. I will also measure the castings that I harvest. A later project will be how to process them to get a consistent texture. Not sure how I am going to harvest them either. A post for another day. I've got to go figure out how to share that spreadsheet.