It would definitely be interesting to do that! I had originally started out wanting to do something as natural as possible, but got myself into all sorts of frustrating trouble with ants getting turned around or wandering off forever. I'm fairly sure these were just failures in implementation, but they forced me towards looking at slightly more artificial designs.

The Ruby-based simulator discussed in this article used Rich Hickey's Clojure ant simulator as a starting point: https://gist.github.com/spacemanaki/1093917

Hickey's simulator was perhaps a bit closer to what you are looking for. It only emits one type of pheremone, which it releases on a continuous basis.

In my simulation, I introduced two types of pheremones: one emitted when food was found, and another emitted when the home was found. In retrospect, I possibly could have continuously emitted the "food" pheremone when traveling outbound, and the "home" pheremone when traveling inbound. I can't remember if I tried that and ran into trouble, or just didn't think of the idea at the time I was building this.

I vaguely remember choosing to implement things this way because it eliminated the noise generated by ants wandering in circles endlessly, but I honestly can't remember why I decided to "improve upon" Hickey's simulator.

It's worth pointing out that though the behavior of the world is very artificial (the whole trail gets marked at once after a complete path is run), the behavior of the ants themselves still only relies on their immediate location. And because these ants don't know where "home" is, they're even dumber than real ants that actually do have some sense of direction.

Anyway, refinements on this simulator or links to other simulations that illustrate these ideas are absolutely welcome! I'd definitely update the article if we found a way to improve upon what I've done.