Excerpt: 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.