Mammals, often, need to be taught by their parents skills and behaviours. This doesn’t seem to be the case with insects which are pretty much “Programmed” to live how they are meant to. Why?
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Nature only improves things that are necessary for survival or add a benefit that outweighs the cost. Learning is extremely beneficial but only under certain circumstances. If you only live for a year, you’re not gonna learn enough to make much of a difference. Your only purpose is to mate and continue the species, after that, what happens to you is irrelevant. So if you live in an environment where a single mistake is deadly, you need all the hard coded instincts you can get to survive long enough to mate. Life is an arms race and if your species decides to spend time and energy developing larger and more complex brains, you’re gonna be out competed by the insects that got larger teeth instead.
You make a lot of sacrifices by developing a brain that can learn. You lose a lot of hard coded instincts, you need a lot more resources to feed that brain, and you have a development period where you know very little. Learning only really works when you have room to grow. That’s why most smarter animals tend to have longer lifespans and are more social species (of course there are exceptions but they tend to lean this way). So if you live a solitary and short life, learning will serve no actual purpose since almost any lesson you learn will be a fatal one, and even if you do survive it won’t be passed onto your offspring.
Although the biggest reason that insects don’t learn the same way mammals do, is that their brain simply isn’t complex enough. Insects are very basic creatures, they have simple nervous and respiratory systems. They are limited by their size and can’t develop a brain complex enough to learn like mammals do, even if they could develop one, they’d be unable to sustain it with the oxygen and nutrients it needs to grow.
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