I don’t know the answer to your questions off the top of my head, unfortunately, but they are most certainly answered in The Ants by E.O. Wilson. It’s a fascinating and artfully written book. I unfortunately gave my copy to a student, or I’d have found the relevant passage for you. (The biomass fact mentioned in a parent comment is mentioned in the book as well.)

Yeah I was surprised too! I don't actually know that much about ants or biology, but

- (1) ants fly!

well they don't usually fly, but they spread wings and fly during a "nuptual flight" to start new colonies [0]. I only learned this a few years ago when I moved into the woods and mass migrations of flying ants often.

From what I can see, all wasps fly, and I can't find anything saying their common ancestor couldn't fly. So since ants can partially fly, I think it's much more likely they evolved from a flying ancestor. They just lost lost the ability to fly most of the time and totally dominated the land niche.

Incidentally, living in the woods has also taught me that there are a variety of wasps that live underground like ants do. I used to think they all built open-air hives.

- (2) I made that comment mostly based on a paper [1] I found while googling around. According to the paper:

> The stinging wasps (Hymenoptera: Aculeata) are an extremely diverse lineage of hymenopteran insects, encompassing over 70,000 described species.... The most well-studied lineages of Aculeata are the ants... and the bees

This is consistent with what I've seen on Wikipedia. Basically ants, bees, and wasps are very closely related. The Wikipedia page on Aculeata [2] has a nice family tree that includes sawflies, bees, and wasps.

So yes, wasps is wide like beetles. But there are more beetles. Beetles get their own order, whereas stinging wasps, bees, and ants have an "infraorder", which I guess is like an order but smaller. The Wikipedia article on Hymenoptera has a family tree that shows the relationship with beetles [3].

[0] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/when-why-winged-ants-swarm-nu...

[1] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aculeata

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera

Yes, ants evolved from wasps, and it's really not that surprising if you take a close look at a typical ant and a typical wasp, pretty much the only difference are wings and coloring. There also exist wingless wasps, and some of them are black and really quite indistinguishable from ants by non-entomologist. And that's after over 100 million years since the ants diverged from the wasps! Talk about a successful evolutionary design. Your closest relative from 100 million years ago was a little vaguely rat-like thing. (Edit to answer your specific question: the ancestor of ants and wasps obviously was winged and flying, since both families still have at least some winged members).

As a sibling has already pointed out ants do fly during "nuptial flight", and then discard their wings... wings would only be a hindrance for their largely underground lifestyle. Also ants have retained the stinger which also functions as an ovipositor (egg layer), and some species still use it for defense and pack a wallop of a poison, right up there with some of the of the worst wasps. Google "bullet ant" for some good stuff. Other ants just bite, and the burning you feel is from their saliva which consists mostly of an acid named after ants: fourmic acid (ant is "formica" in latin).

Edit to add one more random factoid that will surprise a lot of people: termites are not related to ants at all, and they evolved from... (drumroll)... cockroaches! It's rather harder to see the resemblance, except for their diet... both are capable of digesting (with help from endosymbiotic microbes) pure cellulose. And while termites don't really resemble ants either, parallel evolution has chosen the same strategy of retaining the wings for the fertile individuals who go on a nuptial flight and then discard their wings and try to found new colonies.