I don't see why not. Storing a count is not so complex and the animal kingdom is filled with impressive (to our perception) mental feats* (like the dedicated neurones for each octopus tentacles).

Ironically, I find the act of following a pheromone trail counting steps way simpler than them having detailed mappings of their surroundings.

Edit: fears -> feats

You don’t need a sense of numbers, in the abstract mathematical way humans use, to count.

Maybe a human child can’t count to 1000 but they could be taught to put a BB inside a jar every step they take. Then they can take a BB back out of the jar at every step on the way back. When the jar is empty, they’re near home. Even if they can’t count at all, they can keep track of thousands of steps this way given enough attention span and stamina.

Then, just imagine, instead of a BB’s in a jar it’s some chemical signal in the brain.

Maybe its less like a number as we know it, and more like an ant poem or other mnemonic representation?

Quorum sensing does not require a conceptual framework of numbers. The conceptual framework is the harder part, your brain and many cells perform quorumsensing and computations all the time that you would find difficult to do by hand, or to do symbolically.