How to protect honey jar from ants?

It is possible that the outside of your jar has honey residue on it. Try rinsing off the outside of your jar with warm water. I would also give the cabinet the honey is in a good cleaning as well, as I'm sure there is honey residue in there now as well.

I would also try to track the source of these ants and stop them from entering your house at all.

I have had this problem, and fixed it in two different ways:

1. Put the jar into a large ziploc bag. Make sure the bag is tightly sealed. This works well for larger, heavy glass honey jars. Plastic honey jars are too light when they are nearly empty, and the bag tends to tip over in the cabinet and be clumsy to handle.
2. At one point we had two plastic honey jars open. It was more convenient to put them into a plastic storage container that had an airtight seal.

Draw a continuous line of chalk around the surface the jar is standing on. It must be an unbroken line.

I've had this problem and the "clean the jar and the cabinet" (and all of the paths they take, as much as you can to the entry points) advice is what worked for me (as @TheGremlyn states in their answer).

I've also relocated my honey near my spices after observing that area was always devoid of ants. I'm not sure if the spices actually repelled the ants but that area of my cabinet is quite aromatic with custom curry blends, pickling spices, anjwain (strong thyme like), fennel, cloves, pepper/chili, cumin, and many others. There's also spice "dust" on the shelves from the constant shuffling/opening/closing/use.

How often does your ant problem re-occur? After cleaning up, temporarily re-locate the jar for awhile until the ants have stopped sending their scouts in to check. Then put it back in its normal place.

Are there any other items near the honey that may be attracting the ants? If so, temporarily relocate those items too.

You have to put the honey jar in foil so that the ants can't smell it. Make sure that the whole thing is covered in the foil.

It is a joy to use honey dippers--slows me down to reduce stress too :)--and there are so many interesting and creative honey servers with openings for them! After researching sealed options and generally unfavorable comments for many hours, I've decided to give up and use a 4qt pop-top type container [like oxo]. I can see the jar, store the honey dipper in the jar as designed and seal it all from pesky intruders. I hope it works well...I'm looking forward to finding new servers and never considering pests again!

I don't want to hoist my honey out of some hard to access covering or container as I use it frequently. Changing the spot I keep it in seems to work. Re the water idea which also works - put the honey in a container first and then in a tray of water (to counteract a dripping jar).