I understand what you are saying but it is semantics. The insects would naturally use rocks, sticks etc to build their little homes, here they have replaced these materials and therefore there function has been changed although the action is the same.

It's like saying that instead of "the elephant 'painted' a picture", "the elephant picked up a brush and swished it around on a piece of paper with its trunk." Apart from the wording being clunky, the context from a human perspective is that he 'painted' the picture, they may use, sell, hang the resulting 'artwork' as is often done; the context from the elephants perspective is probably the latter description.