Whose Colony?

Abstract The following essay examines the term colony in relation to insect communities. It uses a combination of interdisciplinary critique and personal reflection to track the term across reference texts, entomology articles, popular science books, and humanities research. In doing so, it considers how the word colony circulates in and outside of academic settings as a vague synonym for community but still carries politically fraught histories that are rooted in settler-colonial understandings of natural history. Thus, from one perspective, this essay is a story about paying attention to a word, and it demonstrates how word-tracking can be a methodology that reveals connections and tensions in knowledge systems. From another, it is an argument against the word colony as it currently appears in relation to insect communities: the too-casual use of this complex term invites misreadings of insects’ social arrangements, orients researchers away from social insects’ cross-species relations in favor of single-species analysis, muddies conversations about the interplay between insect community-building and Euro-American settler colonialism, and reframes knowledge so that it can circulate through hierarchical knowledge systems. Moving beyond insect studies, this essay also challenges readers to ponder their habits of labeling nonhuman social arrangements. It advocates for adopting alternative terminology and new systems of naming that might help researchers engage with more-than-human-histories and recognize other creatures’ entanglements in more-than-human colonialisms.