Last weekend I went to an environmental education conference. Apparently there had been a mass emergence of midges shortly before we arrived because the whole place looked like this:
Masses of midges
So, SO many midges! On the other hand, the massive all you can eat buffet of flies made for some good reptile and amphibian sightings. I got to watch a green tree frog sitting under a light absolutely gorging himself, which was awfully cute. There were more spiders out and about than I’d ever seen too. Pretty darned cool!
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The Dragonfly Woman 
I was interested to see the plague of midges, because here at my place in New Hampshire I have had more than the usual number of midges, too. Is there an explanation for this irruption? [Did I make up that word?] And I still have several very active dragonflies, which seems to be late in the season for them. Are they eating the midges? Thanks for any info you can supply…
I can’t say what caused it for sure, but I suspect it had something to do with the fact that we hadn’t gotten any real rain for over a month and then it rained really hard for a couple of days before I saw this. It may have been the first opportunity they had to lay their eggs – there were little gooey clusters of eggs all over the place, on the sidewalks and in puddles and any wet surface!
When a bunch of humans get together, we call it a convention. But midges are a “plague”! That’s speciesist!
I don’t think there’s an official term for a group of midges specifically, but according to the Oxford Dictionary, a group of flies is called a swarm or a cloud. I don’t especially like either of these as they suggest a behavior – flying in a big group – which my midges weren’t doing, thus plague since they were EVERYWHERE. Would it make you feel better if I started calling them a convention of midges rather than a plague of midges? :)