The whole lecture on fire ants being discovered in Acadia National Park made me want to hop up and down, just thinking about my ankles and calves burning from the nasty stings.

Of course, my memories zoomed back to southern fire ant mounds and nests down by the lakeside. Southern red ants “Solenopsis species” are different from these European fire ants – a new invasive insect in Maine, according to University of Maine entomologists Eleanor Groden and Francis Drummond, who have been tracking the ants since 2001.

No matter. Fire ants are fire ants in my book, and despite their minute size, they pack a wallop with a sting that can leave an inflamed whelp on your skin from 1 to 4 inches in diameter.

Mainers already contend with the notorious black fly, a pest that crawls under shirts, up bluejean legs, around the brim of hats, behind ears and if you open your lips to swear, right into your mouth.

Black flies are so aggressive – and in such staggering proliferation this wet summer – that gardeners work in protective suits resembling space outfits and Deet is the perfume of choice.

Next comes Maine’s mosquito population, which would rival in size and voracious bite other mosquitoes anywhere on the planet, I would surmise. Though not an entomologist, I did keep a June bug alive one winter, keeping it tied on a long string to a potted mother-in-law’s tongue plant.

So I know summertime bugs and insects. I know all about silver fish in cereal, chiggers under your socks, weevils in corn meal, roaches nesting in stacks of firewood, mosquitoes so loud at night the bedroom is literally abuzz.

I grew up playing in a fog of DDT when city trucks would spray the neighborhoods. And, I watched as crop duster planes dropped insecticides over fire ant hills in pasture after pasture.

Someone was always telling me when I was a child: Night, night; don’t let the bedbugs bite. Till this day, I hope the bedbugs won’t bite, whatever they are. Surely, they’re not in Maine.

And I hope the European red ant “Myrmica rubra” doesn’t spread. Populations have been confirmed in Cumberland, Hancock, Kennebec, Knox, Waldo, Washington and York counties and have been found in multiple habitats, including lawns, old fields, scrub-shrub and deciduous forests.

Not that I suggest DDT or indiscriminate spraying of pesticides from planes. But Maine’s summertime frolicking is foregone too many times because of uncontrolled mosquitoes, black flies…and now fire ants.

This is supposed to be “vacationland.”