What are the unknown facts about ants?

 

What happens to an ant when it dies? When the ant dies in the colony, the rest of the Ants will ignore the corpse for up to two days. This is because they don’t realise the Ant is dead. The Ant's corpse will lie there for two days until its corpse starts to decay leaving off a chemical called Oleic acid, which to the other Ants signifies death. Once the other Ants get a smell of death, they take the body of the dead Ant and dump it into a pile of other Ant corpses.

Entomologist Edward Wilson experimented by putting drops of Oleic acid onto a live Ant. Once the other Ants got that smell of death, they attempted to drag the struggling Ant to the Ant graveyard even as he tried to clean the Oleic acid of itself.

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2009/04/01/102601823/hey-im-dead-the-story-of-the-very-lively-ant

On the Death Rituals of Ants | The Order of the Good Death Building a meaningful, eco-friendly, and equitable end of life