No Stupid Questions

1 of my Soul's/Continuum's previous-incarnations was as a bee/hornet/wasp life, & I got to experience a taste of that sentience, decades ago..

I'd say no, for the simple reason that their sentience-on-brain is so incredibly efficient, & there's no .. material-basis .. wasted on that specific kind-of-mind..

There is hesitancy, but ?fear? .. it doesn't fit the Soul-memory right..

( the bee/hornet/wasp family is cladistically/genetically flying-ants, with mutations, so this is actual-relatives )

When you see opposing kinds of ants, each with their fighters lined-up, opposite each-other..

that's about as close as you could get to "fear", right?

In that role, there's applying-threat/force & there's hesitancy, balancing between, but .. I'm not finding, in my Soul-memory of that category-of-life, fear.

Notice, also, that when an ant comes back with an injury, other ants will prune their limbs to limit risk-of-infection, if required.. ( recent news, that ), so they're kinda really pragmatic about things like amputations, you know?

Here's a simple method for usually getting someone of the bee/hornet/wasp family out from your home, if they get in..

I'm presuming a house, not an apartment-building with sealed-outer-envelope/wall..

1. make certain you haven't got what they register as FOOD or something smelling openly, as scent overrides thinking, throughout much of the animal-kingdom, so no perfume, no open garbage-can with whatever they eat ( wasps eat meat ) overriding their will..

2. block & darken the paths you don't want them going

3. brighten & open the paths you do want them going ( porch light on, to lighten that path, e.g. )

4. if you have to wave your arms gently, wide, to catch their attention, to get them to intentionally-look-there, do so, then simply have one's arms at one's side, & hold still ( you don't need to move slowly for them: they live MUCH quicker than humans do: I saw a man falling, & it was taking ages, in that previous-incarnation )..

5. keep your eyes slitted, as they'll try flying into your eyes, because the dark-pupil looks to them like a home-sized opening.. ( a beekeeper told me this single point, all the rest is of my Soul-memory/experience )

6. they should "swim" ( it feels like swimming, to them: sentience feels wet, in their crustaceans-living-in-the-air lives ) into the open-luminance, leaving your home, happily..

I've tried this, & it only works with that family: it doesn't work with blackflies, it doesn't work with mosquitos, it doesn't work with beetles, etc..

So, it matches my Soul-memory experience's prediction of their sentiences' behavior.

_ /\ _

It sounds silly, but this is literally the basis for most research. Ask a seemingly simple question you don't know the answer to, quickly realize that it's a lot more complicated than it sounds, search journals for existing research in the area and find it lacking, write up a proposal and convince someone to fund you, do a lot of experiments, and if you don't go crazy or run out of funding, write a paper about it and submit it to journals for peer review.

I wish you good luck!

HEY ANTS!

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

Fear is an emotion, and we can’t know about whether animals (or depending on where you fall on the qualia debate, other humans) feel that emotion. We can measure their behavior, though, and there are a great many studies on animal fear and avoidance behaviors, including ants.

Ants don’t have a memory in the sense that you or I think of. There is no collective memory of “avoid that place” that lives in the minds of ants or a hive because some ants had a bad time in that place, as far as we can tell. However ants deposit pheromones as they navigate the world. Other ants follow along later and maintain or update these pheromone “trails” (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4590477/). Ant pheromone signaling is a deep body of research but there are both positive (go this way) and negative (don’t go this way) signals.

This is a beautiful and clever question, and the answer is: Yes.

Ants are able to learn to avoid places where something bad happens. In the following study, people tried to teach ants not to follow their own pheromones with positive meaning by giving them electric shocks (evil crazy scientists). They were able to teach them to ignore the signals (not to avoid them altogether though). It's kind of a big deal, because these pheromones are normally telling them to follow them, so for the ants not to obey that is a big behavioral change.

It also tells us that electric shocks are efficient agaist ants 😉

https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/224/11/jeb242454/269004/Hard-limits-to-cognitive-flexibility-ants-can

Ants don't like cinnamon, of that's worth anything. Sugar ants don't, at least; I don't know how fire ants feel about it.

You are actually asking two questions, both rather complicated.

1. Is there a chemical that induces avoidance in ants (or at least some ant species)?
2. Can you teach ants to avoid an odor.

After a quick glance at the literature, I'd say that there are some chemicals that induce avoidance.
But I was frankly too lazy to look into the learning aspect.