Banana Sugar Snaps
Your ants love it, and they need it.
This is a natural, handmade product made in small batches, so the colour may vary a little from batch to batch.
 
Sugar Snaps is the original fortified sugar concentrate for ants, created by Ant Antics. We were the first store ever to make a complex, fortified sugar feed of this kind, and the Sugar Snaps name is trademarked. It is well known among keepers, and many other shops quietly sell it under their own white-label branding, colours and flavours.
 
What sets it apart is simple: it is concentrated, and it is honest. We do not water our feeds down. The work has already been done for you, so a little goes a long way.
 
What's in it, and why
Every bottle is built around the sugars ants actually use, with a short, deliberate list of support nutrients. Nothing is in here to pad out a label.
 
Fructose, Glucose and Sucrose.
These are the three sugars that make up natural nectar and aphid honeydew, the carbohydrate sources ants feed on in the wild. They are simple sugars, which means 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 Snaps its thick, slow-pouring body. It is the reason a single drop 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.
Banana flavouring.
Because ants find ripe banana hard to resist.
 
How to use it
Snaps is a concentrate, so treat it as one.
For a founding colony, a single undiluted drop every 10 days or so is plenty, providing a large amount of sugar in one small treat.
 
For regular feeding, mix 5 to 15 drops per 10ml of water for a fortified sugar water. Adjust to suit your colony, and use mineral or filtered water rather than tap.
 
A 10ml bottle goes a long way. Refrigerate on arrival, and use Snaps in place of honey or plain sugar water rather than alongside it.
 
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. Snaps 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. Snaps does that job properly and leaves the rest to the part of the diet that does it naturally.
 
Once opened consume within 8 weeks
KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN