Snaps.Refined
Pure and refined.
This is a natural, handmade product, and its consistency may vary a little from batch to batch.
Snaps.Refined is the purest expression of our trademarked Sugar Snaps formula: uncoloured, unflavoured, and extra thick. It is the same fortified formula as our flavoured Snaps, made with premium ingredients only, high-quality glacier water, trace minerals, and natural fruit sugars (never cane).
Because it is thicker, it dilutes a little further. Mix at roughly 1:15 with mineral or filtered water for a constant supply of clean, fortified sugars and nutrients. Being clear and flavourless, it suits keepers who want a neutral feed with nothing added for show.
What's in it, and why
Every bottle is built around the sugars ants actually use, with a short, deliberate list of support nutrients.
Fructose, Glucose and Sucrose.
The natural fruit sugars that make up nectar and aphid honeydew, the carbohydrate ants feed on in the wild. Being simple sugars, they are immediately usable as energy.
Trace minerals.
The small mineral fraction an ant draws on alongside its energy intake.
Electrolytes.
A clean, salt-derived solution that aids water retention and supports nerve and muscle function.
Agar.
This is what gives Refined its thick, slow-pouring body, the reason it holds together and lasts rather than running off like watered feed.
Vitamin B2 (Riboflavin).
A cofactor the ant uses to process and release energy from sugars, fats and proteins.
Vitamin B5 (Pantothenic acid).
The building block of coenzyme A, which sits at the centre of energy metabolism.
A note on the science: why simple sugars
There is a fashion for claiming "complex" carbohydrates are somehow superior. For an ant, the opposite is true.
An ant runs on simple sugars. Its own circulating blood sugar is trehalose, and the carbohydrates it gathers in nature, nectar and honeydew, are built from glucose, fructose and sucrose. These are absorbed and used directly.
A complex carbohydrate cannot be used as it is. The ant has to break it back down into simple sugars first, using enzymes it carries only in limited and variable amounts. So a complex carb is not a better fuel. It is a fuel the ant has to work to unlock, and whatever it cannot break down passes through unused. Refined gives ants the sugars they can use straight away.
We also keep the fortification deliberate rather than showy. It would be easy to load a sugar feed with a long list of vitamins to make the label look impressive, but most of that would simply repeat what your ants already get from the protein side of their diet, the insects, eggs and protein feeds that carry their amino acids, sterols and the wider vitamin range.
We focus on what actually earns its place in a sugar feed: the cofactors an ant uses to process sugar, plus electrolytes and trace minerals. A sugar feed's job is energy. Refined does that job properly and leaves the rest to the part of the diet that does it naturally.
The Sugar Snaps brand by Ant Antics is well known among keepers. Even if you have not bought it directly, many stores sell our trademarked product under their own white-label branding, colours and flavours.
