The way it's supposed to work is after the queen ant mates, either in the air, or after fanning pheromones from atop tall grasses where they perch, they're supposed to remove their wings right then and there. However, if they are interrupted shortly after landing, they may forgo removing them entirely. Usually queens that keep their wings on aren't successful because they carry the extra hazard of being attached to things easily if wet. Winged queens that are successful though will eventually ware them down to nubs. Regardless of removing them or not, they are not usable after their nuptial flight. The wing muscles are (not sure on the right word here) basically broken down, like they're not usable here.
Queen ants are like dandelion seeds. They take off with the wind and shed their mode of flight shortly after landing.
Ants vs. Termites are easy to tell apart. Ants have a waist segment and come in the colors black, red, orange, brown, and yellow (others too but they're not common). Termites, while they technically have three body segments, these segments are poorly defined, and their body color is most commonly white, while some will have pale yellow, or orange heads. Reproductive (King and Queen) termites will have darker bodies but their wings make an X pattern when flying. It's very noticeable once you learn to see it.
Ants are more closely related to Bees and Wasps, technically ants are just wingless wasps but that's confusing because there's another family of insects in this group that are "Wingless Wasps" often called Velvet Ants.
Ants vs. Velvet Ants.
Velvet ants, while they lack wings (though sometimes the males to specie are winged) all universally lack a waist segment. This is a body segment found between the thorax and "abdomen" (called a gaster on ants because the waist segment is technically part of the abdomen). It's just a segment of the abdomen that evolved to be really narrow to allow for better flexibility, some ant families even have two of them. Also All Velvet Ants are solitary! They're basically wasps that dig burrows in the sand and fill them with dead bugs, laying an egg in each chamber. Individual females sometimes band together but not often enough to be considered social, on par with the way adolescent birds sometimes help mom and dad feed the next generation. Ants are always social, with the exception of inquilin parasites that have lost their worker caste but even then they're living in a host colony of ants.
Ants vs. Wasps. There are some wasps that have waist segments, but they're never social. Potter wasps for instance have quite the narrow waist and it could be considered a segment but they're solitary, don't have a worker caste, and never shed their wings. Ants are always social, they almost always have a worker caste except for inquilin parasite species, and wings are only used to assist with mating. Ants even fly different! Wasps duck and maneuver in and out of foliage to hunt for caterpillars and forage, while queens ants are complete disasters when it comes to flight. Often when trying to take off, queen ants will spiral out of control and crash right into he ground a few times before finally making it into the air.