Do Ants Sleep? Do Queen Ants Get More Sleep than Worker Ants?

A pretty common question that I’ve asked myself is do ants sleep?

If you’re watching ants crawl around your house you’re probably not ever finding them asleep. In fact they seem pretty active most of the time.

In this article i will cover a few interesting topics including whether queen ants live a better live than the worker ants.

Ants Overview

Ants of many different types are found throughout the country. They are one of the most advanced and successful insect groups. Ants are social insects living in colonies. Each colony has different types or castes of ants. The castes include, depending on the colony, soldiers, workers, queens and males.

Once a colony is mature or very large, male and female winged reproductives are produced which may mate in the nest or during swarming.

Ants swarming in kitchen

When do ants swarm?

Ants swarm at various times throughout the year. After mating, the male soon dies. The fertilized female or queen seeks a suitable nesting place and deposits a small batch of eggs. The eggs then go through complete metamorphosis. The hatched larvae are cared for by the female until they pupate and finally emerge as adults.

Development from egg to adult usually takes about two months, but varies with different species and climatic conditions. These new individuals are wingless, sterile female workers. The workers of some species may be quite different in size or even appearance. These workers then take over the tasks of foraging for food, expanding the size of the nest, and caring for the next group of larvae.

Do ants die off in the winter?

The ant colony remains intact through the winter by hibernating. However, if a colony occurs indoors, the individuals may remain active all year around.

Ants are bothersome to people for several reasons and become annoying when they invade homes during foraging. Some species nest in wood and may do structural damage. Some ants can bite or deliver a painful sting.

Do Ants Sleep?

The short answer is yes. Ants do sleep. Research has shown that ants be found sleeping in three different locations in a laboratory environment where they lived in an artificial nest chamber. Those 3 locations are:

On the ceiling
Against a chamber wall
Center of the chamber wall

The research also found that the ants sleeping in the center of the chamber wall would sleep for shorter periods than the other ants. This is most likely explained that most of the action takes place in the center of the chamber wall. In other words, ants probably don’t like to be interrupted when they sleep.

The proof that they were sleeping is that while asleep ants were not responsive to contact by other ants. Interestingly, while sleeping ants quickly move their antennae. Researches actually believe that this shows they’re in deep sleep.

Ants would sleep about 90-250 times during the day. Each sleep episode would last about 1 to 6 minutes. In other words, ants are extreme power nappers. When you add up all these sleep episodes they would sleep from 4 to over 9 hours per day.

Not that similar than us, other than each episode is really, really short.

Do Queen Ants Get More Sleep Than Worker Ants?

Yes, they do. In this research environment queen ants would sleep significantly longer per episode. In fact, each sleep episode for a queen ant would last just about 6 minutes, while worker ants would only sleep for just over a minute. While the sleep episodes are significantly longer for the queen ants, the worker ants do get more of these breaks.

So in total, worker ants would go to sleep about 250 times in a day, while queen ants only did so about 90 times per day.

Adding that all up brings the total hours of sleep for a worker ant to about 4.8 hours per day while queen ants would sleep for 9.4 hours. That’s significantly more. Very close to double the hours.

In other words, the queen ants are very deserving of their name!