Lilly bulb bug?

I accidently dug up a lilly bulb yesterday and was about to put it back when I noticed it had made no progress towards growing at all.

On closed observation the bulb was crawling with small white maggot type bugs (very thin and wiry)

I looked through my "RHS pests and disease book" at 4 am this morning, but found nothing that matched exactly.

any ideas please and how do I get rid of it - I have hundreds of lillies and need to keep it in check!

 

The only thing i`ve seen like that is Cut Worm waco,but i think they prefer cabbage.

 

well I could understand it on a cabbage, but this was under the ground on a bulb?????

 

My Dad used to cultivate things he called "white worms" to feed his tropical fish. They were not quite an inch long, less than a millimetre thick, and sometimes seemed to have a blackish thread running through them. He bred them in a box of damp soil under a mouldy old bread crust!

If this sounds like what you found, maybe the lily had died from another cause and these creatures were just eating the decomposing bulb - so weren't really a pest at all... Is that possible?

Also swift moth caterpillars sometimes attack bulbs and hollow them out - they're white but they'd be fatter and less worm-like, and the moths are usually found in areas of rough grassland. No chance of a photo, I suppose???

 

A thought Ha - It was a Martagon lily, so quite special to me and it was in a damp mossy sort of place. It had little bulbils all over it and I did think about growing them on, but thought better of it and chucked it in the river!

 

Could these grubs be the offspring of the dreaded weavil, if so you are in deadly trouble.