my son read and told me putting wax worms on a jig head which is ironic because that day I had seen them in the cooler at the academy I was getting hooks and was wonder what they were best use.

wax worms will catch a lot of species (crappie, sunfish, bass, sandbass, barfish, channel catfish, even gizzard shad, carp, buffalo) I personally have hooked all of these species while using wax worms. up north people use grubs wax worms and maggots ALOT for Crappie through the ice.

In the late 80's I fished the bridge pillars with my son at Fork. I would be using jigs for crappie while he used wax worms for bluegill.

He never caught any crappie using the wax worms but he caught a ton of bluegill. When the crappie stopped biting I would switch to wax worms and catch bluegill with him. It seems odd we did not catch any crappie with them. The crappie were there as I had caught them earlier in the day.

I know crappie will take wax worms as I have watched some of the ice fishing videos on Youtube. They just bit them for us.

I guess it could be the bluegill were more aggressive than the crappie and would beat them to the bait when we were fishing the wax worms. Wax worms are extremely durable. We would often catch two-three bluegill on a single wax worm before we had to replace it.

He was 8 at the time and loved catching bluegill. He did not care much for crappie as he could not catch them that well. But bluegills would attack his bait every time he dropped it into the water and would give him quite a fight.

We would fill a large cooler with bluegill every trip for our next door neighbor. She preferred bluegill over any other fish. When she saw me pull into the driveway with the boat she would come over to see how many bluegill Mike had caught for her.

That's good stuff right there EZgoing. Funny you mention fork because that is where I was fishing when I first discovered that Crappie love Wax Worms. this was back in 2007 or 2008 and I was at pope's landing for a fishing retreat. I was waiting on the rest of my party so we could go out after some crappie in the boat fishing timber. I was under the covered boat slips, and to kill time I had a 10ft telescopic graphite pole and some wax worms trying to catch some of those big bluegill. After catching 3-4 small gills and one really nice one, my float layed on its side instead of going down. I picked up the pole, and as I was lifting the line started going off to the side under where I was sitting, very un bluegill like. When I got it to the surface and saw that it was a crappie, I was in total shock. I quickly got the fish out of the water. measured it and put it on my stringer. I started swimming my wax worm like a jig after that and caught several more crappie that day, and the remainder of the trip tipping jigs with them (caught an AWFUL LOT of bluegill as well). The rest is history.

Swimming could be the key. We would just drop them straight down and let the fish hit on them.

In the winter time this will wok good. with just the slightest twitch. The key is to hook them through the head and not the middle. The drawback is that this makes them a bit easier for the gills to nip off

We always hooked them through the middle so to provide the most movement by them. We would drop them straight down. Generally by the time the hook had settled six foot or less a bluegill would be hooked.

You did not need to set a hook, they would hook themselves.

So thinking about it now the wax worms probably were not getting as deep as the crappie were suspended before the bluegill were on them.

So I guess I need to order some wax worms to add to my jigs to see what happens.

At the very least I should start catching bluegills again.

I wonder if there is a wax worm scent or spray? if not someone should work on that

I don't think it's the scent that attracts the bluegill, I think it is the wiggle of the wax worm on the hook. They were very active on the hook.

I remember that once a wax worm stopped wiggling the bluegill stopped hitting it and we had to put a new one on the hook.