Keep in mind that most of these jellies are manufactured for the rearing of certain beetles which have vastly different diets than ants. They've simply been adopted by antkeepers—mistakenly, in my view—because someone observed that ants would apparently consume the substance, and shopkeepers found they could make money selling it to a wider range of insect hobbyists. However, whether ants eat a substance isn't a measure of its quality. Ants will eat poison if it's loaded with sugar.
As has been discussed numerous times, many synthetic diets—particularly ones containing protein isolates derived from milk (whey and casein), are of dubious nutritive value to many species of ants. In replication studies, scientists have observed that colonies fed a synthetic diet "failed to thrive," in that the workers remained relatively healthy, but brood production and development was stunted by the synthetic diet.
It sometimes takes decades for scientific findings to percolate up and modify the behavior of established hobbyist communities, so that is why many still use, recommend, and sell these products. However, the fact remains that with all these synthetic or "complete" dietary products marketed towards antkeepers, one is effectively only overpaying for the sugar which acts to attract the ants, because the particular proteins the diets contain don't really benefit the ants.
Edited by drtrmiller, December 6 2018 - 12:33 AM.
