If there's no sequential bottleneck in information processing, where one piece of information is made available to almost all subsystems, then there's probably no consciousness. If it is the case, we cannot say that the system as a whole is aware of something, because there's no common 'something' available to all subsystems.

Returning to ants, the anthill as a whole could probably be aware of a coarse assessment of its own wellbeing without any details.