IceShanty.com's Ice Fishing Community
Ice Fishing Tips -Check your local regulations! => Ice Fishing Live Baits and Plastics => Topic started by: Spider1 on Oct 20, 2016, 10:21 AM
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Does anybody collect acorn grubs? I experimented with them the last couple years. The first year I had a lot of difficulty keeping them alive. I would but a few layers of newspaper in the bottom of a bucket and fill the bucket half way with acorns and collect the grubs every couple days. I would get about 50 of them each time but they would die on me pretty quick. Tried everything from corn meal to newspaper, leaf litter to dirt. Finally settled on dirt that was left out to freeze which worked ok but it was a bear to bust apart for bait through the season.
In the second season I found the best solution. I froze them. Nothing else in the container, just collected them and and put them in a small tupperware container and popped them into the freezer. When I needed some I would take out a few dozen and leave the rest in the freezer. they lasted all winter into the spring. The ones I took out would thaw out and wiggle around until I used them and I would put them back in the freezer when I was done for the day.
In case you didn't know, acorns, and I found them mostly in red oak acorns, are full of the things often getting 2 or 3 out of a single acorn but many acorns didn't have any. They look kinda like wax worms but are the size of a fat maggot.
Just figured I'd throw it out there.
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Very interesting ....are you using this years acorns to produce this years bait ...also where are you storing your bucket ...outside ...basement.. etc ?
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I'm trying Chestnut weevils right now. Collecting them and putting them in the fridge when they're emerging from the shells with nothing added. Want to see how long they'll keep. Never tried this before so I'm shooting from the hip as well. The largest ones are about the size of a fly maggot. So far (two weeks or so for the oldest) they are keeping just fine in the fridge.
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You have to collect the acorns pretty much as soon as they fall. The grubs bore their way out of the acorn pretty fast after it hits the ground. When you look at an older acorn and see a small hole in it, that's from the grub. They drop out of the acorn and burrow into the ground. I keep the bucket in the basement and dump it carefully onto a large piece of cardboard. The grubs are usually inside the newspaper but they are sometimes in with the acorns also. I've had them bore out as I am sitting there collecting them. I usually get about 50 grubs at a time and I just put them into the tupperware container and into the freezer. Then I dump the acorns back into the bucket. They usually produce grubs for a month or more. I have 3 different types of oak trees in my yard, a white oak, a chestnut oak and a red oak. I usually only find them in the red oak acorns for some reason. I've heard that they also like hickory nuts as well. The grub matures into the acorn weevil.
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I've been collecting and using them for years from hickory nuts. Easiest bait to collect and I have found that putting them in a container like a butter tub with nothing else works best. Only bait we use all fall and always take some on the ice. I do dump them out on paper towel about once a week and gently roll them around to clean what I think is urine off from them. If you don't they will get a strong ammonia like smell and not last very long. 4-5 five gallon buckets of hickory nuts will yield a few thousand worms on average. The only hard part is collecting the nuts.
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try freezing some. It's crazy to see them come back to life after freezing and there is no maintenance.
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golden rods here work out ok
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golden rods here work out ok
just found out about these last season....they work pretty good
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A local ice fishing bluegill hole here in northern indiana... a guy was fishing with these grubs and outfished everyone of us around him.
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I got skunked on the grubs this year. The white oaks didn't drop any acorns this year (which never seem to have grubs in them) so the deer hoovered up the red oak acorns as soon as they dropped. To bad too cuz they last all year in the freezer.