Forgive me if you can’t read my writing this morning. I’m having trouble typing because I have a bee sting on the ring finger of my right hand. I keep hitting the wrong keys because my finger is swollen and hard to bend. Plus, I have to stop every few words or so to scratch at the maddening itch.

Every now and then, the ant bite on my foot will itch enough to take my mind off the bee sting.

The tick bites no longer itch, but I do still have to obsessively check them every 20 minutes for any sign of a developing bull’s-eye rash.

We shall not speak of the flea bites, except to say that my dog picked a heck of a week to be banished from the air-conditioned house.

I do not have any mosquito bites at the moment. This is odd because I am normally a mosquito magnet. This might be because I have been taking extra B vitamins, and B vitamins can repel mosquitos, according to the health experts at Google.

I can still remember my first bee sting. Except it wasn’t a bee, it was a yellowjacket. It was July 20, 1969, and I was out on the carport helping my dad in his workshop. I remember the date because later that day I lay on the bed with an ice pack on my leg, watching the moon landing on TV.

My daughter got her first sting at age 2, when she discovered the hard way that a yellowjacket was building a nest under the rim of the Little Tikes swing.

My son doesn’t have a good story to go with his first sting. He was just walking along and stepped on a bee.

One time, while traipsing around in the woods with some friends, we discovered a huge hornets’ nest dangling over a small creek. The grownups in the group were slowly backing away, keeping a respectful distance, when suddenly from behind us the 13-year-old boy in the group started lobbing rocks at the nest.

His father only got him to stop by promising him that, if he’d stop chunking rocks at the nest, they could set fire to it later.

I got my current bee sting at the pool. I was just standing in the water chatting to my husband when I spotted a dead bee floating toward me. I scooped it up and tossed it over the side of the pool.

I was wrong about the dead part.

I can’t really blame the bee. I’d react much the same way if somebody suddenly flung me out of the water just as I was getting into my backstroke.

Thankfully, my husband was there to pull out the stinger, which I couldn’t see to do because I wasn’t wearing my glasses, because I was in the pool.

It stung like the dickens for about 30 seconds, and then it stopped, and I basically forgot about it, because I was in the pool, until 24 hours later when it suddenly swelled up like a balloon and started itching like mad.

I know I should have put something on it right away — lemon juice, meat tenderizer, toothpaste or tobacco, according to the health experts at Google, but I was in the pool. I carry a lot of things in the swim bag, but a cigar isn’t one of them.

Anybody know if they make a ring-sized ice pack?