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Originally Posted by HyperactiveSloth
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Originally Posted by jenadke
I was interested and did some googling and the general consensus is that this gel stuff is honey, multivitamins, water, and store gelatin boiled together. Get those dissolving vitamin capsules that you can break open. Follow the gelatin instructions, but add the multivitamin capsules and the honey to the boiling water.
You could possibly add preservatives to keep it from molding longer, dunno how that does to the ant diet...
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Actually, that stuff is probably better than anything else you could put in it. You wouldn't need preservatives because honey is a natural preservative. It's an anti-fungal and anti-bacterial agent.
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Actually, honey is the perfect breeding ground for bacteria and fungus. Raw honey doesn't spoil (and bacteria can't grow) because of its incredibly low water content. It doesn't however, kill bacteria, which is why you can't feed honey to babies. Honey contains some dormant bacteria from the bees that can kill them.
Apparently honey is chock full of vitamins, so after you add more water, it becomes the perfect breeding ground, so it may spoil. Also this means you may not need the multivitamin.
One thing you will need for the ants though is protein, there are some plant starches that provide protein. The easy way is to grind up animal food, but that probably won't boil in clear. Dunno if ants can digest whey protein (doubt it). Others call for dried egg yolk (which definately spoil, but will have fat, which the ants also need), or I guess you could use soy protein.
There is one recipe in patent
#6,916,469 (it's illegal to violate a patent
).
I suppose you can try. At the very least if the mixture kills them because they ate it you can patent a new insecticide.