Do Ants Sleep?

From leaf-cutter ants to honeypot ants, every single ant in the world is a veritable and sincere worker at heart. It doesn’t even matter if they’re “her majesty the Queen (ant)” or a simple worker , or even a near-redundant drone ; every member of the hive pitches in for the colony.

Have you ever seen one of these critters taking a break?

Chances are, not at all. When we come across ants, they’re scurrying across surfaces, carrying bits of sugar from your kitchen or patches of leaves from your garden. If we’re a bit unlucky, we come across them in more painful circumstances that involve us swatting them off our bodies.

So, when we sit down to think about it, few of us—in fact, almost none of us—would probably ever have seen an ant at rest. This leads to the question, do these frenetic insects ever rest at all?

It’s cliché to answer a question with a question, yet that’s exactly what we’re going to do (sorry!). We, as humans, have a warped idea of what rest means to us. When we’re done with a day of work, we like to unwind by planting ourselves on the couch and binging TV; or some days, when we’re really tired, we may go home, head straight to the bed, and take a nap that can last anywhere between a few minutes to 9 hours.

Ants, on the other hand, have no TV shows to binge, nor do they have multiple hours at their disposal. In typical ant fashion, ants optimize the system of rest as well!

How do ants rest?

Napping. This following sentence may throw you for a loop but this is essentially how ants rest:

Ants nap a lot of the time, but not all of the time. Think of it like this: none of us have ever seen an ant, or at least an uninjured ant, stand still for more than a minute. That one minute of inactivity is a worker or drone ant’s equivalent of a power nap. Studies conducted by scientists indicate that an ant may take as many as 480 tiny one-minute (or even shorter) naps in a 12-hour time frame. If we do the math, that’s about 8 minutes of nap time for every 12 hours. Ants basically nap for just 16 minutes over a whole day.

If you think that’s a dangerously small amount of rest, that’s not even the worst part; remember that ants do not even rest the entire 8 minutes in one go!

A power nap indeed

All ants are hard workers, yet some ants fare better than others. Queen ants get more rest, as well as a better quality of rest, than their lowly subjects. Queens sleep almost 90 times in a single day.

This may seem counterintuitive when we recall that workers sleep around 480 times in a day, but here’s the kicker: queen ants sleep for 6 minutes every time they take a nap. Queen ants sleep for over 9 hours a day!

Readability: 77.7

Flesch Kincaid Grade Level: 6.6