eye fly

• eye-fly

eye fly (plural eye flies)

1. Any of various kinds of tiny black flies (especially of the family Chloropidae) which swarm around the eyes of people and animals. [from 19th c.]
   • 1924, EM Forster, A Passage to India, Penguin, published 2005, page 93:

     Electricity had paid no attention, and a colony of eye-flies had come instead and blackened the coils with their bodies.

• eye gnat