storing night crawlers

[flight control]

Every year, I collect about 1-2000 night crawlers to use as bait. Every year, about mid to late may, I have a massive die off. I go through them once or twice a week, picking out the dead ones, but I'm just prolonging the inevitable. By June, all my bait is dead.

My dad can keep them in his basement all year, but I have to keep them in my shed, as all I have is a crawl space under my house and there is no way I'm going down there every time I want worms, especially when the spiders come out of hibernation. Also a die off down there would result in a stench of catastrophic proportions in my house.

I think the reason they all die in my shed is temperature, so here is the solution I came up with. I dug a hole on the north side of the shed and placed a large plastic tub in it. Filled the tub with dirt and added my worms.covered them with dead grass for food and also some straw to hold in moisture. I'll feed them lawn clippings and stuff like that if they survive. My grandfather used to feed his with oatmeal and that worked pretty good. I will probably lose some worms through the small drainage holes in the tub, but they end up in my lawn as breeding stock.

Anyone else keep worms for bait? Any tips you might want to share?

[triplecurl]

Never kept that many for bait. We don't get night crawlers around here like that. What I do to keep the ones I buy is put them in the refrigerator. They keep for quite a long time in there as long as you keep the dirt moist and feed 'em once in a while. As many as you have you would need a dedicated fridge.

[DC727]

Somewhere cold. Like the fridge

[bill herian]

Are you sure you need more than one thousand nightcrawlers?

Just pick a few dozen every time it rains. Keep your soil moist and most importantly cool.

I keep them in a bucket in the basement stairwell all summer.

[flight control]

I've kept some in the fridge before, way in the back, bottom shelf in containers I knew no one would open.

A dedicated fridge would be great, just don't have one, or the room to put it in.

The reason I keep so many is I love to fish for white perch with the kids, and we can easily go through 100 in a day. I also use them troling for trout with those walleye rigs. Drives people nuts when my brother and I go around a lake catching trout left right and center and the old guys stay anchored all day and not catch a thing. I've seen many of them refuse to wave back at us when we pass by, and many won't even talk to us at the launch. It also drives them nuts that we release some of our trout.

[bill herian]

Sounds like you don't need any fuckin help.

[Mornin Beef]

Sounds like you don't need any fuckin help.

he knows he needs a fridge.

[flight control]

Sounds like you don't need any fuckin help.

3/4 of the fun in fshing is pissing people off! Once my bait dies, I have to find other people and different ways to piss them off. I suppose I could piss off the lady by emptying out her yogurt container and filling it with worms, then back into the fridge.