Buy your mealworms early

[Springbuck1]

Has anybody but me ever had no luck at all with meal worms. I have been buying them and using them for 30 years and don't remember ever catching anything on them.  

No, you are not alone. 

When I first started ice fishing, people told me to buy meal worms instead of crawlers, so I did, and had several dry- hole days at PV, Mantua,  and Utah Lake before I found some WAX worms, which "broke the ice" for me. 

Since then I've caught a bunch of fish tipping with mealworms, especially REAL mealworms (the little squiggly ones, as the big ones you most often see are actually a completely different species), but I always seem to do much better on waxies, mousies, spikes, and perch eyes.  

I tried soldierfly larvae once, because I found them super cheap on Ebay, but they were pretty mediocre, and matured enough to pupate within three weeks (even without food). 

I had GREAT luck when we cut down a diseased honey locust tree in the fall once and I harvested about 200 locust-borer beetle larvae from under the bark and the hollow of the trunk.   Those things were MONEY!