The Birmingham age-herald., 1905-01-19
RUNS A WORM FARM.
Maine Man Grows 'Em For Bait and
 Is Prosperous.

Bangor, Me. letter in the New York Sun.
 T am the only man in America'-
 The man who was beginning to tell the story and who was stoppd by finding an obstruction in the pipe he was smok- ing was Carl Beers, the prosperous own CT of the largest greenhouse in the city. As he was born in Sweden and had not been in this country more than ten years, his hearers were ready to dis pute him, when the trouble with the pipe was remedied, and he went on:
 As l was saying, l am the only man in America-as far as know-who makes a business of breeding eartht worms for commercial purposes. The way I came to take it was natural enough. Every winter the fishermen used to come to the house where I was repottng plants for spring blooming and take every angleworm they could find in the earth. By and by they grew so greedy that when I had a pot that held no worms they would reproach me ana call me hard names. This led to my making an agreement with them to fur nish all the worms they wanted for $1 a hundred or 12 cents for ten worms.
 For the first year or so I did no more than fair business, but as it was noised dDfodu Illdl beerS kept n1Ce WOTInS TOT sale the orders came in fast. I now have six hogsheads filled with rich earth and every ounce of the earth is sewed through and through and bolted together with fat angleworms. l do not know how many there are In all, but 1 think there are more than a million of them. Anyhow, I sell enough to bring in rom $250 to $SO0 a year. nearly all of which is clear gain. as the worms live on leaves 4s,,rr ,t.lxI xs1l me nothing except a few minutes every day spent in throwing the sweepings of the rooms where I trim my plants, Into the hogsheads and pouring in a pail of water now and then as the earth gets dry.
 Some of my worms are perfect giants There are more than 800 worms in my collection, every one of which is eight or more inches in length and as big around as a carpenters blue pencil The parents of these worms I imported from Belgium, where they raise the biggest earth worms in the world. In among the monsters are other worms so small you can hardly see them with out glasses. But the little fellows will grow and be big enough to sell next winter. It takes about three years for an earthworm to come to full maturity.
 Most of them will live much longer,
  gin to break in two. each part turning to a perfect worm, so I try to keep my selling stock under three years of age. They are more uniform and the fish seem to like the young worms better than they do the ones which are old and tough.
 An earthworm has more methods of increasing its family than a tor onion. They lay eggs by the thousand, and every egg Is very sure to hatch. Then, after the laying season is over, the fe- males will put out little pink spines, and every spine of this sort will grow into a worm and drop off and crawl away just as if that was the most ap- proved way of making worms. Final ly when the worms become old and fat, they seem to break in two from their own weight, and instead of going to a worm hospital or bleeding to death, IS they should do, the wounds heal up right away, and there are two perfect worms where there had been only one. Anyone who knows the habits of earth worms will agree with me that there is never any danger of the stock becom-
 ing extinct so long as they continue to multiply the way they do now.