McNEILL — John W. Sones, Jr., maintains that, although he doesn’t have any scientific evidence to prove it, when he fishes for catfish with catalpa worms, he can double his catch. The worms are also called catawba worms. He says they are the best natural bait for catching catfish.

He says the “most serious endeavor” of his life is fishing, and he owns a fishing camp at Port Gibson on the Mississippi River, and he once caught 800 catfish on trotlines using catalpa worms as bait. “I had to give ’em away I caught so many catfish,” says Sones.

“These worms are so fat, so juicy that the old catfish just can’t resist it. It’s like a piece of glowing chocolate at the end of your line,” says Sones.

“Over the past 30 years, I have learned that I can catch twice as many fish with catalpa worms than any other bait,” he says.

Sones has written a book about the catalpa worms and the tree that hosts it, and nearly all of the information below comes from him and his book, with just a little from the Internet.

Sones, like some other worm farmers across the South, grow the catalpa trees, harvest the worms off the trees and sell them. It is a growing and developing cottage industry. Worms left over can be frozen and used again later, thus extending the usefulness of a purchase of worms. Sones says he has a friend in Brookhaven who has 2,500 trees.

Also, the worms can be sold frozen. Sones says he has fished with worms that have been frozen for years. Even after thawing, the worms are still fresh and rubbery, just right for threading on a hook.

Sones is enthralled with the fish bait, which is a worm that eventually produces the Catalpa Sphinx, a hawk moth, which flies onto the catalpa tree and lays its eggs under the leaves, and begins the cycle over again. The catalpa worms eat the leaves, drop off the tree at maturity and burrow into the earth to pupate, and the moth hatches out to begin the cycle all over again. It happens every 30 days. “To see the moth emerge, spread its wings and fly off to the tree is truly an amazing miracle of nature,” says Sones.

As the catalpa worm eats the leaves off the catalpa tree (it uses only this tree in its life cycle) at its peak as a caterpillar, it is prime fish bait.

Its history stretches back hundreds of years, used by early settlers and Native Americans alike, according to a listing on the Internet. The tree was also used as medicine by Native Americans and to make fence posts and furniture by settlers.

The tree was named after the Catawba Indian tribe in South Carolina, and tribes throughout the Southeastern U.S. long ago used the tree as a snake bite antidote, a laxative, and a cure for whooping cough and heart ailments.

Some tribes smoked the bean pod, and the tree is also know as the “Indian Cigar Tree,” or “Indian Bean Tree,” according to the Internet source.

The tree is native to the Southeastern United States, and there are nine varieties.

Sones, who began planting the trees in the early 1970s just to produce bait for himself, now has 1,000 planted on his farm in Sones Chapel Community just north of McNeill. He said one time he estimated he had 40,000 to 50,000 worms develop during one cycle and they ate every leaf off his trees in that cycle. “The weather was perfect, and I couldn’t harvest all of them, even by hiring help,” he said.

“There were so many they ate every leaf off every tree and this was far more than I could harvest even with extra help. They were crawling all over the yard, on shrubs, weeds and other type of trees,” he said.

Sones sells the worms wholesale. He’s never advertised and sells his product only by word-of-mouth. However, some producers are already selling the worms as bait over the Internet. He said if he lived near the Mississippi River, he could sell as much as he could raise. He’s produced a small book about the burgeoning industry, showing how its done. “The business just grew by word-of-mouth,” he added.

“Almost any little boy who lived in the South up until recent times, remembers going fishing, and hunting a catalpa tree to get some fishing bait, the worms, off the tree,” says Sones.

Some think the worm is so good at attracting fish because when punctured by putting on the hook, it exudes a sweet-smelling goo that the fish just can’t resist. It permeates the water and attracts the fish from far away and the fish can’t resist taking a bite.

Sones wholesales his worms at 15 cents each. At bait shops, they retail from 25 cents to 35 cents per worm, and in Oklahoma they sell for three for a dollar.

“I don’t compete with bait shops. I sell them in lots of 200,” says Sones. He says if the weather and ground conditions are right, he can produce a crop of worms every 30 days. “But if the weather does not cooperate, the cycle can be broken one month. But it starts over as soon as the weather cooperates. It’s amazing how tied to the weather conditions the worms are,” he adds.

Sones graduated from Mississippi State University in 1958 with a master’s degree and worked 30 years with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.