I attached two pictures of my worm bin.

The second one is a closeup of the bin with the shredded newspaper as a substrate. There seems to be a lot of castings in there, or it looks like alot of castings. Those are castings right? They look like little grey pellets

Can anyone tell me how i can remove the castings from the bin so i can have a fresh bin?

The worm activity seems to have died down because as you can see in the closeup pic, there is an apple core that is still there from 1 week ago. It hasnt been degraded by my worms at all. I think the large amount of castings is making them not grow/be active.

There are also mites in my wormbin. Theyre annoying me but i dont know if therye annoying the worms. How do i remove them?
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/508/img0025ug.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/692/img0026it.jpg/