Sugar, especially beet granulated sugar, has a slight odor. All ant species can distinguish different odors, but their olfactory range varies from a few centimeters to several meters. Desert ants can smell sugar from up to 3 meters away.
Ants are food sources that cannot be sniffed from a distance and "smell" them by touching them (contact chemoreception). In a sense, they recognize the food they discover by smelling it. Yes, ants can smell sugar (although contact chemoreception is similar to taste). A colony of ants sends out scouting her ants for food in different directions, often at ranges of 100 to 200 meters. (depending on territory borders and season). Scouts march steadily on less circuitous trails at first if they have memory of previous feeder locations. (Ants use visual landmarks and a stereo-olfactory system to create and navigate olfactory maps.) Periodically stop and look for olfactory cues. Then it moves to a more tedious random search. And that search ends when you get close to the sugar and can smell it.
Ant antennae have hair-like sensillum containing one or more sensory neurons. Most sensory cells contain olfactory neurons. Each neuron sends a long nerve fiber through an antennal nerve that ends in the antennal lobe of its brain. The axons of olfactory sensory neurons terminate in lobes in spherical structures called glomeruli. Ants' antennal lobes are particularly large, containing about 420-430 glomeruli. (Bee is 160). The more glomeruli, the more diverse odors an ant can handle. This gives ants a keen sense of smell.
Once prey is found, Scouts collect a small sample and return to the colony to find the shortest route and leave a trail of pheromones. At the colony, other ants analyze the food brought by the scouts and follow the trails laid out by the scouts. As more ants ride the trail, the markings become stronger, allowing other ants looking for them to smell the trail and join them. This sugar-detection process is not entirely intuitive and requires learning need to do it. Leader Scouts are happy to take students and teach them how to forage for food. Students walk behind their teacher in a pair march called a tandem run. The pair will stop from time to time to help students memorize landmarks. When the student is finished, tap her twice on the master's hind leg or stomach to start moving again. (When you see a pair stop like this, stroking the fur on the parent ant's hind legs will keep it moving. If the student and parent are too far apart, the parent will slow down and the student will run towards it Up)
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