Here at City of Images we have a healthy respect for the great outdoors, and the indoors, too – all doors, really. But concerning the great outdoors, the tiniest part of it – the micro world of insects – has been looming larger, what with Spring having sprung and Summer encroaching. Come to think of it, most of Winter was a sham, wasn’t it, more of a mild summer dressed in a lightweight jacket. In any case, we thought we’d get you in the mood for the gorgeous winged things and creepy crawlies of the balmier months, and many others besides, with this gallery of micro-locals.

As a bonus, we trawled the wild web and found some insect-centric quotations worth thinking about as we step lively around ants’ nests, spiders’ webs, the mud huts of bees, and the homes of all of our smaller but no less important critters.

Hurt no living things:
Ladybird, nor butterfly,
Nor moth with dusty wing.
– Christina Georgina Rosetti (poet)

Ants are the dominant insects of the world, and they’ve had a great impact on habitats almost all over the land surface of the world for more than 50 million years.
– EO Wilson (biologist, and myrmecologist: an ant expert – there’s a word I’d like to slip into a sentence)

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
– Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months.
– EO Wilson (again, but he’s worth it)

I never kill insects. If I see ants or spiders in the room, I pick them up and take them outside. Karma is everything.
– Holly Valance (actor)

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.
– Friedrich Nietzsche (philosopher, author and provocateur)

Well, let me tell you, ants are the dominant insects. They make up as much as a quarter of the biomass of all insects in the world. They are the principal predators. They’re the cemetery workers.
– EO Wilson (wow)

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky
– Dante Gabriel Rosetti (poet)