Maggot is one of the best animal baits for catching fish during the open water season. Its use is especially important in the fall in cold water, when fish are no longer caught normally on plant baits.
With the transition of fish to animal food, associated with the cooling of water, summer baits also cease to be effective. Adding live and pupated maggots (casters) to the food makes the simplest baits work.
What kind of fish can be caught using maggots?
Absolutely all peaceful fish are caught using maggots: crucian carp, carp, tench, roach, rudd, silver bream, bream, bleak, and so on.
A passing perch or small bee, which often cuts off the thin leash, will not miss the maggot. Carp will happily swallow a bunch of maggots or a “sandwich” in combination with a worm or some kind of plant bait. Here it is important to know how to place maggots on a hook correctly.
Large fish sometimes prefer to be caught on maggot pupae (caster).
Breeding and growing maggots
For reference: Maggot is the larva of blowflies that lay eggs on stale meat, fish and dairy products, as well as on vegetables and fruits. Moreover, flies give preference to meat and fish, and the largest maggots are obtained from gray blow flies.
Maggot breeding on an industrial scale is carried out on special farms.
Due to the fact that maggots are grown artificially, they are available as bait all year round.
It is almost impossible to grow maggots at home, since there are no ways to completely get rid of the odors that accompany the process (everything is complicated by the fact that the larvae secrete an enzyme that accelerates the process of decomposition of the nutrient mass).
On farms, small and large, flies of a certain species are raised for breeding maggots (gray blowfly Calliphora vormitoria, blue blowfly Calliphora vicina Diptera, Calliphoridae). Green flies produce small maggots. The flies are kept in special cages in which they breed.
Maggots grow in incubator containers, from which they are removed after ripening (after 7 days). To produce a colored maggot, the dye is added directly to the meat on which it feeds.
How to preserve maggots
Maggot is an excellent bait for fishing, absolutely all fishermen know this. Maggot is an excellent bait for many reasons, but the main ones include:
- Maggot is second only to bloodworms in catchability.
- The catchability is explained by the good softness of the bloodworm.
- If the shell of motil is not hard, then the fish will bite on it with a bang.
- Canned maggots are usually painted golden using powders and are flavored for normal interaction with the bait.
- The converted maggot looks exactly the same on the hook as a live bloodworm.
- It can be stored for a long time when canned, but when opened, the shelf life is not too long.
There are several ways to preserve maggots at home. Of course, it’s easier to buy ready-made canned maggots; the price is not too high. But if you want to tinker and prepare the bait yourself, then you can choose one of these methods.
If you marinate maggots in a cold way, then it will develop a hard skin and the fish will react very poorly to it. You can candied maggots in thick sugar syrup, but it quickly deteriorates, although fish bite on it perfectly. You can also try salting it, it will be perfectly stored in the summer even in the heat, and the fish will like it all.
Consider the fact that during cold preservation, maggots can live in solution for several days. This means that pupae or spoiled larvae may form in the jar. You can try pouring boiling water over the maggot; it stores well, but becomes very soft. Soft maggots do not stick well to the hook; this should also be taken into account when preparing the bait.
You can try pouring a tablespoon of salt into a 200 gram jar and adding yellow dye and flavorings to the same container. Take the maggot and pour boiling water over it, then put it in a jar and dilute the whole mixture with water at room temperature, and mix everything thoroughly. Close the jar with a lid, and before you go fishing, you need to transfer the bait to the bloodworm. If you need to prepare large volumes of bait, then you just need to increase the dose of salt, dye and flavoring. It would be nice to use converters to increase shelf life, but such chemicals, unfortunately, are not sold at retail.
Maggot that is biting
Preparing maggots for fishing involves cleaning them after growing, flavoring them, and in some cases, coloring them.
Step by step it looks like this:
- cleaning;
- coloring;
- aromatization.
After this, the bait is packaged and stored in the refrigerator at a temperature from 0 to +5 ° C, where the larvae enter suspended animation - vital processes slow down, the larvae do not feed, do not grow or pupate.
How to clean and color maggots
Typically, cleaning maggots involves passing them through a layer of dry sawdust after the larvae reach the desired size. Then they are sprinkled with a mixture of sawdust and flavorings and sent for sale.
But this is often not enough.
Passing through sawdust does not clean the maggot from the inside, as can be seen from the dark translucent stripes. And the outside of the maggot does not become truly clean and is unpleasant to handle.
Unfortunately, very often you come across maggots on sale, which are only suitable for adding to bait, but not for bait.
What to do:
If you bought poorly cleaned maggots or got them yourself, after superficial cleaning in sawdust, the larvae should be thoroughly washed. It is best to wash the larvae in a solution of water and unscented liquid soap. You don’t have to skimp on the soap; nothing will happen to the larvae.
After washing in a soapy solution, it should be rinsed several times in clean water and dried in sawdust.
In order for the maggot to be cleared of blackness from the inside, it is placed for some time (3-5 hours) in grated cheese or cottage cheese. This can be done immediately before fishing. This process can be combined with staining the larvae, as described below.
In addition to the fact that the maggot becomes clean, the larvae become more elastic and stay on the hook longer. Clean and bouncy, it quickly finds itself swallowed by fish - that's all we were looking for.
Coloring
If the larvae have not yet reached the stage where they stop feeding and are preparing to pupate, the best way to dye it is to feed it with cottage cheese and milk colored with food coloring yellow, orange or red.
Red food coloring can be replaced with beet juice, and a yellow tint can be obtained by feeding maggots with egg yolk.
Once fed with the colored food, the maggot will acquire the desired color.
Coloring maggots
Stores, as a rule, sell not only naturally colored maggots, but also colored ones – most often red. You can paint maggots almost any color at home.
To this day, in print and online publications you can find recommendations for dyeing maggots using highly complex technologies: degreasing, soaking and “washing” the larvae in various solutions, followed by dyeing.
Most likely, such recommendations are nothing more than the fruits of the theorists’ imagination, because any practicing fisherman knows that maggots always take on the color of the substrate on which they feed or are kept.
It is enough to purchase in a store, for example, an “Easter Egg Set” with multi-colored dyes - and you can start experimenting.
A dye of the desired color is added, for example, to a finely grated boiled egg or cottage cheese, and placed in a container containing maggots. In a few days you will get larvae of any color of the rainbow.
True, the color will not be too intense. However, food coloring does not cause any harm to maggots.
When using home methods for coloring maggots, it can always return to its natural color - just transfer it to clean sawdust or bran.
After some time, it will gradually clear of paint. Industrially dyed maggots retain their artificial color under any conditions.
Flavoring maggots
There are both supporters of aromatization and its opponents.
Some believe that fish bite better on flavored larvae, while others advocate naturalness. Since the natural aroma of the larvae is the smell of rotten meat, it turns out that there is no need to clean the maggots?
But you must admit, even if the smell has absolutely no significance for the fish, it is much more pleasant for the fisherman to fish by placing clean, elastic larvae with the aroma of some vanilla on the hook.
The main method of changing the smell of maggots is to aromatize the sawdust in which it will be stored. They are sprayed with a ready-made flavoring agent with the desired smell.
Instead, you can add dried dill, garlic or other spices to the sawdust. Some fishermen boil sawdust along with spices and then dry them.
Flavoring for maggots
Why is this being done? You know that these beautiful larvae sometimes emit just a terrible ammonia smell. The first reason I add aromatics is to cover the smell of ammonia. Of course, they can be washed. But this is time-consuming, so we just add aromatics. But before that, we need to remove the bulk that sellers usually fill it with so that it does not spoil, to remove excess moisture. Most often they use starch, corn flour, and sawdust. To deepen it in dry aromatics, you first need to sift it all out. It has already absorbed the smell of ammonia, the maggot may no longer stink, but this backfill smells quite unpleasant.
We sprinkle some of the maggots. You can use a fishing sieve, or pour it in the wind so that the larvae fall and the wind blows them away. I use a sieve through which I clean the maggots. I will keep all the garbage, and then I will pour the maggots into a box. I get clean maggots that have a slightly unpleasant odor.
I take dry aromatics, you can take aromatics from absolutely any bait manufacturer. Many have this item in their assortment. If not, you can use culinary additives, sweet or spicy, it doesn't matter. The main thing is that they emit a pleasant smell, first of all, for you, and the second point is that I think the fish will like it too.
Very little aromatics are needed. We interrupt, and voila, it already smells like vanilla. You can pour it in the evening and put the jar in the refrigerator. The longer it sits in this powder, the better it will smell. At the same time, when you add it to the bait, some part of the dry flavor also gets into the bait. This is a big plus. These baits are additionally already scented, you take them on the hook and thereby highlight your bait with aroma. The method is universal, it works always, everywhere. I always carry dry aromatics with me, everywhere, for all these procedures. Also, if excess moisture gets into your maggot, you can remove it by simply covering it with dry aromatics.
Storing maggots
At home, maggots are stored in the refrigerator in a hermetically sealed jar. At temperatures from 0 to +8 °C, the larvae enter into suspended animation and their development is suspended, and at temperatures above 8 °C, the maggot wakes up and gradually turns into casters (pupates).
The best storage temperature for maggots is 0-2 °C, good - 2-5 °C, acceptable - 5-8 °C. Frozen larvae usually die after thawing.
To keep maggots longer, they are taken out of suspended animation from time to time, shaken up and sent back to the refrigerator. At home, maggots can be stored without problems for up to two months.
How long to store maggots:
How to breed maggots at home?
Despite the fact that maggots can be purchased today in almost every fishing store, breeding them at home has not lost its relevance.
Firstly, not all stores offer maggots of adequate quality. Very often, having bought a bag of larvae, a fisherman finds among the sawdust some maggots that have already pupated, and some that are loose and barely alive.
Before reaching the counter, maggots go through quite a long journey from the manufacturer through intermediaries, and along the way, the requirements for its storage are not always met.
In many stores, maggots are regularly sorted out and sold, first of all, those that are, as they say, “living out their last days.”
Secondly, a fisherman who breeds maggots on his own can be absolutely sure of the purity and sterility of the larvae. And thirdly, home breeding of maggots can be economically profitable.
After all, maggots are used not only as bait, but also as an effective bait when fishing for carp, and in this case, you will have to buy it for hundreds of rubles, which not every angler can afford.
