LARAMIE, Wyo. — IT’S summertime, the season of insects, and if you spend any time outdoors (or even indoors), you’ve probably been swatting and stomping your way toward fall. Mosquitoes and midges dance over ponds, butterflies and bumblebees tussle on daisies, crickets and katydids trill melodies, moths zigzag around lights leaving dusty trails.

Pests all, you might assume of these six-legged creatures. And hundreds of them are just that — pests. Mosquitoes and lice suck our blood and spread diseases, armies of caterpillars eat our crops, flies divebomb us, termites eat our homes, roaches invade our kitchens.

But of the millions of insects, only a tiny fraction of them, less than 1 percent, are pests. A vast majority are beneficial to humans: They are pollinators, seed dispersers, nutrient recyclers, soil producers and predators or parasites of plant-feeding insects. They are food for frogs, salamanders, lizards, snakes and especially birds. Some are important indicators of water quality. Bugs contain an astronomical array of chemical compounds, some exploited commercially, such as beeswax and cochineal dye. And they are sources of medicines, oils, waxes, fibers, dyes and scents.

In North America, 87,000 insect species have been identified. Most are microscopic and mysterious. The tiniest, fairy fly wasps, are too Lilliputian to see; they’re so small that several can have a dance party on the head of a pin. You might actually inhale and exhale a fairy fly, just as you might a dust speck.