by Louie Stout

You could say that Danny and Terry Moran of Osceola go nuts over fishing.

Or perhaps it’s the “nuts” that drive them to fishing success.

And they use them to catch bluegills. Not the nuts, but the tiny worms inside them.

They discovered years ago from an ol’ uncle that tiny grubs thrive inside those nuts and they make great fishing baits, especially when panfish are looking for bitty morsels, such as during the ice fishing season.

“They also work well in the early spring when the bluegills are up around the lily pads,” said Danny.

The worms are larvae of the acorn beetle ranging from ¼-3/8 inches long. They are creamy white.

The adult weevil will burrow into the nut while it’s developing on the tree and will lay her eggs inside the nut. Sometime after the nut falls from the tree, the eggs will hatch and the larvae will chew its way out.

Each fall, the Moran brothers gather a five-pound potato sack of acorns then place it in a five gallon bucket. They check the bag regularly, looking for the grubs that have emerged from the nuts and fallen into the bucket.

“We gather them up, put them in a butter dish with some wood shavings, punch holes in the top and put them in the refrigerator,” said Danny Moran. “You can get quite a few of the worms from a five-pound bag of nuts and we use them throughout the winter and into the spring.”

Several will die and will need thinned out, but there’s generally plenty available for spring fishing as well.

Do they work better than mousies or bee moths that you can buy from a baitshop?

“I can’t say that,” said Moran. “But they are cheaper and readily available if you want to take the time to collect them.”

They’ve been using the acorn grubs since the 1980s. They’re smaller than store-bought bait but work great when the fish tend to want a smaller morsel, especially on the back of an ice jig.

The anglers also grow their own red worms, noting that the tiny worms “reproduce like rabbits,” therefore they keep them well stocked throughout the summer fishing season when they run out of nut worms.

They purchased the initial stock of red worms through a site on the internet a few years ago and keep them in a box filled with buss bedding.

“We feed them vegetable scraps we put in the box; they especially like the pumpkins we cut up in the fall,” he said. “They reproduce like crazy and fish love those things.”