One of the 'dada' people in the field of behavioural ecology, E. O. Wilson wrote -

despite the accessibility and ease of study of social insects, they have received relatively little attention in general textbooks of biology, ecology and behavior, perhaps because their life cycles and anatomy initially seem more complex, their diversity greater and the literature consequently more "technical". All this remoteness is due to the accident of our mammalian origins. If the first highly intelligent linguistic species had been a termite instead of an Old World primate, the reverse perspective would exist. Vertebrates would be noted chiefly for their gigantism, scarcity, and unfamiliar anatomy.


:)