How much honey can a mantis handle?

[Sneaky123]

Does anyone have any advice on how much/how often one should feed their mantids honey? I ask this because I just had a little bit of a scary experience.

I must have had some honey residue on my fingers (I'd made a sandwich earlier and had decided to give my crippled limbata some honey while the jar was out) because my healthy limbata began nibbling my fingers the way they sometimes do to water droplets on the side of their enclosures. Seeing this, I put a drop of honey on some tweezers and hovered it in front of his face. The way he reacted was not how I expected.

He seemed to become extremely wary of the tweezers/honey. I could tell he noticed it right away, as he stared straight at the tip of the tweezers (where the honey was) and his antennae stood on end. He then carefully hovered his antennae over the honey, and lightly touched it. After this, he struck at it and went into defense position. He then immediately started vomiting what looked like slightly digested or diluted honey. He kept cleaning his forelegs, which kind of frustrated me because whenever he would do so he would get more honey in his mouth and eject it again.

Despite all this, he immediately went back to being his normal self: very energetic and curious. He's been climbing all over me and my desk and all my stuff for the past hour and a half, so I think he's fine. Anyone have any similar experiences? I'm guessing maybe he just ate too much sugar at once or it "tasted" too sweet on his antennae or something. I doubt that it has to do with feeding my other mantis with the same tweezers since I washed it between mantids, and I don't think the honey was bad because I fed my ghost a worm partially glazed in the same honey and she just ate it up with no problems.

This does make me wonder how much honey is healthy for a mantis. I almost never feed it to mine in the first place, so I've never had any trial-and-error type situations with this (and I'd like to avoid having any if possible).

 

[CosbyArt]

@Sneaky123 I've never seen or heard of a mantid vomiting from honey before. I imagine though the honey was purchased at a grocery store and not the real thing, see here. Even then still have not heard of that, but have my suspicions you have a bad batch and it should be tossed.

Only honey purchased from bee keepers is really honey, as the rest is purified to remove all traces of pollen and things that make it honey. There are also tales of the honey supply being sold in bulk to foreign countries who cut it a bit with corn syrup and other additives, only to resale it back to the US for a large profit.

If you do not know any bee keepers or raise bees then try Amish people's sale stands (common here), or you can try local farmer markets as many sell there, and specialty "apple orchids" type stores as they buy from bee keepers - around here for me that is Melton's Orchids and Applacres.

I've read it is suggested to offer honey to mantids only as a treat once per week, and have heard of others doing it much more often.

 

[crabbypatty]

Hmm, yeah that does sound weird. I've never given my mantids undiluted honey though. I'll normally flavor some water with raw unfiltered honey and offer it to them with a dropper and they love it. I'll do this every once in awhile for them. I've never had any regurgitate or vomit after honey.