This contribution is a pilot study on the representation of insects and its evolution in French media discourse. Based on a corpus comprising a fourth of the issues published by the national newspaper Le Monde between 1944 and 2015, it draws on an approach which combines collocational analysis with methods of time series exploration taken from the field of textometrics and diachronic corpus linguistics. Focusing on the collocations of the nouns abeille ('bee') and moustique ('mosquito'), its results show the emerging contradictory relationship of modern societies towards the species, oscillating between the practice of control and the need for protection of biodiversity.