One of a race of large insectile aliens in Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" quartet. The buggers operate as a hive mind, controlled by a central queen who manipulates potentially thousands of drones. The queen's connection to her drones is instantaneous, even across distances of hundreds of light-years; the means by which this is done was eventually reproduced by humans in the ansible.

When the buggers first encountered humans in outer space, they killed many of them. The humans interpreted this as attempted genocide and defended themselves. But in fact the buggers assumed humans operated as a hive mind as they did, and that killing a single human would have no effect on the "organism" as a whole. This fundamental misunderstanding led to two major bugger-human wars, and finally to a concentrated assault on the bugger homeworld to wipe out their species once and for all before humanity was wiped out first.

They almost succeeded; one immature and cocooned bugger queen was preserved on a distant colony world of the buggers, and was eventually discovered by Ender Wiggin. He carried this queen until he arrived on Lusitania, three thousand years later, and allowed the queen to emerge and repopulate her species without human interference.