What Do Termites Look Like? And What Types Are in Florida?

Half the people who call us asking "is this a termite" are actually describing an ant. The two get mixed up constantly, and it matters, because one of them eats your house and one of them doesn't. Here's how to tell them apart.

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The inspection is free. Austin has run our termite work since 2013, and he's the one who comes out, looks at what you've actually got, and tells you straight. If it turns out you don't have termites, we'll tell you that too, and you're out nothing.

What a termite actually looks like

Termites come in three forms, and you'll usually only ever see one of them. Workers are cream colored, soft bodied, and about an eighth of an inch long, which is why people call them white ants even though that's not what they are. Soldiers look similar but have a noticeably darker, harder head, built for defending the colony rather than feeding it.

The one people actually see is the swarmer, the reproductive form that leaves the colony to start a new one. Swarmers have wings and run a quarter to three eighths of an inch long. That's what's in the photo above, and that's almost always what triggers the phone call.

Termite or ant: the actual tell

Both swarm. Both have wings at that stage. Both fly around a light source and drop their wings after. That's exactly why they get confused. Here's the one thing that actually separates them every time.

An ant has a pinched waist, which gives it three distinct body segments you can see with the naked eye. A termite's body is straight through, no pinch, which gives it two segments instead of three. If you can get close enough to see the waist, you've got your answer.

Wings are the other tell, if you find them without the bug attached. Termite wings are all the same length, front and back. Ant wings are noticeably different lengths, front pair longer than the back pair.

That's what shed termite wings actually look like once the swarmers have paired off. Small, translucent, roughly even in length, usually found near a window, a light fixture, or wherever the light source was that drew them in. If you're not sure what you're looking at, the easiest thing to do is take a picture and send it to us. We'd honestly rather tell you it's not termites than have you sit there guessing.

What types of termites are actually in Florida

More than most people expect. There are several species of drywood termite here, including the powderpost termite, and several species of subterranean termite as well. Eastern subterranean is what we see most often in this area. Formosan termites are present too, and worth mentioning specifically, we've seen more of them in Pinellas County this year than in any year before it. Dampwood termites are here as well, though they don't tend to cause the kind of damage the others do, and we'd still treat for them if we found them.

For the practical question of what's actually in your house, it almost always comes down to two of those. Subterranean termites live in the ground and come up into a structure from below. Drywood termites live inside the wood itself, whether that's your framing, a tree in your yard, a bush, a stack of firewood, or an old fence. Which one you've got changes how we treat it, which is part of why we come look before we quote anything.

When it's genuinely not termites

Plenty of calls turn out to be something else entirely, and that's a fine outcome. Carpenter ants leave a coarse sawdust rather than pellets. Regular ants swarm too, especially after rain. Even the occasional stray moth near a porch light gets mistaken for a swarmer if someone's already anxious about it. None of that is a wasted call. It's exactly the kind of thing worth checking rather than guessing about.