Is an Insect Colony a Colony?

Scroll this

This post introduces Janice Vis’ recently published Environmental Humanities article, “Whose Colony?: Rethinking Terminology and Insect Relations.”

Read the Full Article

It started with caterpillars.

This was not surprising, really. I’d become a little bit obsessed while working on a literary study of webworms, a species of moth caterpillars local to the Great Lakes region. I was thinking about the stories that circulate around these creatures, collecting references from newspapers, government reports, kids’ books, poetry, and pretty much any text and cultural object. I started to develop a webworm vocabulary: for example, caterpillars are called “larvae,” and their leaf-eating habits are dubbed “defoliation.” But the large silken structures that webworms spin created a challenge: some sources called them “webs,” others “nests,” and others still used “colony.” This last term made me pause, and soon, it seemed like I was seeing the word everywhere. Agriculture Canada claims that fall webworm caterpillars live “as a colony.”1 The term also appears in the CBC reporting, and it is used in various blogs and gardening articles.2

Fall webworms in a tree
Fig. 1. Photograph of Fall Webworms courtesy of Janice Vis.

Why this word? Was “colony” a formal term, a scientific one? I struggled to find answers. To complicate matters, colony isn’t a term equally applied to all insect communities. Webworm caterpillar collectives are only sometimes called “colonies,” but bee, ant, and termite communities are called “colonies” by default. I began to wonder: is there something fundamentally similar (or different) about the collectives of webworm and bees, some factor that made the word “colony” more or less appropriate? Was it really the best term for any of these communities?

Colony “conjures up images of settler colonialism, of displacement, of land theft against Indigenous people, of violence. It didn’t seem to belong to webworm caterpillars, who have been peacefully weaving their nests in the Great Lakes Region for thousands of years, and I imagined it didn’t belong to other species either.”

I was suspicious: for me, the word conjures up images of settler colonialism, of displacement, of land theft against Indigenous people, of violence. It didn’t seem to belong to webworm caterpillars, who have been peacefully weaving their nests in the Great Lakes Region for thousands of years, and I imagined it didn’t belong to other species either. But I decided to find out, and so I pulled out some reference books and started to write. I initially imagined I’d scribbled out a short blog post or reflection. However, the more I researched “colony”and its relationship to social insects, the more my writing expanded, crossing more and more disciplinary borders. Soon, I was diving into etymology, entomology, evolutionary science, and urban beekeeping—all had their own relationship to this troublesome word.

Balancing these different kinds of knowledge often felt tricky, especially since I’m not a scientist, a historian, or a beekeeper. I wanted to acknowledge the limitations of my knowledge, but I also wanted to follow where this word led me. It was clear that I was going to need to do a lot more research, and my imagined blog post morphed into a full-length academic paper that was published in Environmental Humanities in early 2026. The paper traces some of the origins and uses of “colony,” arguing that this word is rooted in inaccurate understandings of insects, and that it makes it more difficult for us to understand how insects form relationships with each other, with other species, and how we (as a diverse collection of insects and humans) differently contend with the settler colonial forces in our respective worlds. It also invites us to be more attentive to the words we use to describe and name other beings’ living arrangements. That is, “colony” is so commonplace it is often nearly invisible in our vocabularies, but that doesn’t mean it neutrally reflects nonhuman relations or is void of political power. I believe it unnecessarily orients us towards more hierarchal understandings of relations, and it glosses over the reciprocity and collective ingenuity of other beings.

Older, abandoned wasp nest in a tree during a colder month when there is no foliage.
Fig. 2. Photograph of Wasp nest courtesy of Janice Vis.

Changing a single word in our vocabulary will not, for course, magically reshape our relations, but it might help us re-encounter other creatures and re-examine our assumptions about how they live. Choosing other terms like family, community, or (taking a note from Vanessa Watts3) societies while considering how species living in particular places may be one small step toward learning from and with other kinds of creatures. Indeed, since writing this paper, there have been moments when I’ve almost used word “colony” in relation to insects, but then stopped mid-sentence, paused, and thought about what (and who!) I was responding to. This pause is a quiet moment of re-learning and un-learning. It’s a moment to re-encounter the language I’ve inherited, its possibilities and its shortcomings, and to consider how I can use language to cultivate more respectful more-than-human relationships. In this way, it’s also an opening towards new language practises. Rather than settle on a single, universal alternative to the term “colony,” I’m trying to pay more attention to the ways that different critters build lives together and, at the same time, understand how my language is intertwined with my responsibilities and possibilities in a place where many different kinds of collectives live together.

Notes

  1. “Fall Webworm.” Government of Canada, 24 Jan. 2020, agriculture.canada.ca/en/agricultural-
    production/crop-protection/diseases-and-pests-agroforestry/fall-webworm    . Accessed 7 Feb. 2025.  ↩︎
  2. Mia Urquhart, “Judging by the silky nests in N.B. trees, it’s been a good year for the fall webworm,” CBC News (St. John, NB), Sept. 9, 2023. ↩︎
  3. Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!),” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 23. ↩︎
The following two tabs change content below.
My Instagram profile

Janice Vis

Janice Vis is a recent PhD graduate from the department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her research engages with several academic fields, including the Environmental Humanities, Critical Animal Studies, and Composition Theory. She's also an award winning writer of creative nonfiction, and she has several scholarly and creative publications that can be found on janicevis.wordpress.com.

NiCHE encourages comments and constructive discussion of our articles. We reserve the right to delete comments that fail to meet our guidelines including comments under aliases, or that contain spam, harassment, or attacks on an individual.