I have found on two occasions that if I leave a bucket of water in my fish room for a few weeks then blood worm appears in it for a while. First time was in my daphnia tank which is unfiltered, unoxygenated and unheated. Second time was in a bucket that I had a filter in which I meant to clean and forgot about. Unfortunately these dont last long - a week or two at best. Would probably help if I fed them . Funny enough I had a glass jar with water in it on the window sill for months without any so I think surface area may play a part. I know this doesn't help you right now but perhaps its an option if you dont come right.
Leave some water outside to stand. Keep it in the shade and add some leaf litter. The worms should appear after a few days. It is important that the water have some nutrients (hence the leaves) and not be in direct sun (and become too hot). You will notice the detritus tubes the larvae live in before seeing the bright red worms. The easiest way to harvest the larvae is to swirl a net in the container. This should break up the tubes and expose the worms. They can then be manipulated with a wide-bore pipette. Good luck.
I wrote an entire article about this on the OTHER forum a few years ago (Pre 2010?) My method involved pretty much what was explained above. Start a greenwater culture in a bucket, add some sort of phosphate to create hair algae (bloodworms will eat this) and toss in some cheap fish flakes / pet pellets. Check in about a week by using a small net to scrape their algae 'cocoons' from the bottom. Clean them off and feed. My apistos lived off this stuff! I found that using a plastic basin (Crazy Plastics, oval 75L for R50!) with a large surface area works well. I'm currently working on the below project. Here's what I'm doing. If you want to breed these, you'll need to build a netted structure over your water in such a way that the midge flies cant escape. Similar to how labs breed mosquitoes. You need something like above but with a tray of water. Add in your live bloodworms to the tray, Let them pupate and meta into midge flies and they will start mating within your net. They will lay eggs on the water in a few days and die (they don't eat when they meta into flying form). The process will start again and you'll have a steady supply. Just remember to harvest 50% and split your bloodworms into 2 nets when you first start out. Wen you are satisfied that they have laid eggs (you'll see slime sacks in the water if you use a black tray) you can release the flies or feed them to fish. As far as I know, midge flies in SA don't have biting mouth-parts. There may be a chance that you have the biting kind so google some pics and make sure you're not breeding blood suckers. If the above doesn't work or you can't find live bloodworms, watch this as an alternative.
I meant to add... If you do end up harvesting more bloodworms than you can use, pop them in the fridge (somewhere at the front, in one of the door shelves) to winter them over and prevent them from turning into flies. Fair warning though, I never got this far to test if my theory does work. You may lose your batch or you may not. As long as it isn't frozen, it should be okay.
