Video summarisation approaches have various fields of application, specifically related to organising, browsing and accessing large video databases. In this paper, the appropriateness of biologically inspired models to tackle these problems is discussed and suitable strategy for unsupervised video summarisation is derived. In our proposal, we model the ability of ants to build live structures with their bodies in order to discover, in a distributed and unsupervised way, a tree-structured organization and summarisation of the video data. An experimental evaluation validating the feasibility and the robustness of this novel approach is presented.