Help please

[BertMcCracken42]

Hello,
this is my first post here so I hope this works out. I need your help: Last year I caught a queen (maybe Lasisus Niger but I am not sure) after her nuptial flight in a Jar (inside were water supply, a bit of earth and a little hut to hide) and I was lucky, she layed eggs. I feed her maple sirup (which she ate) and hibernated her and her first gen workers from october to march withhin that jar. The jar started to smell a bit moldy but I did not know what I could do about it. Well now I placed the Jar inside my arena (connected to an actual nest which the ants don´t seem to be super intrested in till now) so that the workers now have to gather the food which worked out quite well for the last 3 month but since 2 weeks I rarely see workers at the food (dryed insects, protein powder, honey,...) and when I look at the queen she seem to barely move anymore. I don´t know what is wrong but I think some of the honey might have leaked in the sand and now the arena smells wierd.
So I would like to ask you if that is normal that the workers might a bit inactive for ~2 weeks? (maybe it is not a big deal and I should just keep changing food and water and ventilate the arena regulary so they will be fine)
I really don´t want the queen to die. Please help!

[SYUTEO]

First of all, ants don't eat dried insects. And the reason why they're not coming out to find food is most likely due to the colony already having lots of repletes which are workers that store food in their gasters for later use.

[BertMcCracken42]

Thy I thought they would eat them (I got them from an ant store). What source of protein would you recommend?

[SYUTEO]

Freshly killed insects. But you can make protein jelly for your ants by using the dried insects you bought (there should be tutorials on how to do that).