Head to head
Ant vs Termite
Termites are sometimes called white ants, but they are not ants at all. Ants and termites both live in large colonies with a queen and a worker force, and the winged forms of both can swarm at the same time of year, which is why they get mixed up, but they come from completely different parts of the insect family tree and live in different ways.
| Ant | Termite | |
|---|---|---|
| Related to | Wasps and bees (order Hymenoptera) | Cockroaches (order Blattodea) |
| Waist | Sharply pinched | Thick and straight, no pinch |
| Antennae | Bent, or elbowed | Straight and bead-like |
| Body colour | Usually dark and hard | Usually pale, soft, sometimes near-white |
| Workers | All female | Both male and female |
| Development | Complete metamorphosis, with a pupa | Gradual, no pupal stage |
| Main food | Prey, seeds, honeydew, farmed fungus | Cellulose, digested with gut microbes |
| Role in nature | Predators, scavengers, seed dispersers | Decomposers of wood and plant litter |
Ant vs Termite: common questions
How do I tell a flying ant from a flying termite?
Look at the waist, the antennae, and the wings. A winged ant has the pinched waist of an ant, elbowed antennae, and two pairs of wings of clearly different sizes, with the front pair larger. A winged termite has no waist pinch, so its body looks like a straight tube, straight bead-like antennae, and two pairs of wings that are the same size and shape, usually longer than the body, and that break off easily after the flight, so you often find piles of equal-length shed wings near a termite swarm. Both swarm on warm, humid, still days, often after rain, and both are just the reproductive males and future queens leaving to start new colonies.
Are termites just white ants?
No, and the old name white ant is misleading. Termites and ants are not closely related at all. Termites evolved from within the cockroaches and are essentially social, wood-eating cockroaches, while ants evolved from wasps. Their similarities, living in big colonies with a queen, sterile castes, and cooperative nest life, are a case of two very distant insect lineages independently arriving at the same social solution. They differ in body shape, in the sexes of their workers, in how they develop, and above all in diet, since ants are hunters and gatherers and termites are decomposers of plant material. Ants are in fact one of the termites' major enemies, raiding their nests for food.
Which is worse for a house, ants or termites?
Termites, by a wide margin, where they occur. The wood-eating termites, especially the subterranean and drywood species, consume the structural timber of a building from the inside, often for years before the damage is noticed, and they cause enormous repair costs in warmer regions. Ants that nest in houses are mostly a nuisance rather than a structural threat, foraging for food in kitchens and forming trails, though carpenter ants are an exception because they excavate galleries in damp or decaying wood to nest, weakening it over time, without actually eating it. In short, ants in the house usually mean a cleaning and sealing problem, while termites in the house mean a serious inspection and treatment problem.