Yes, ants sleep. They just don’t do it the way we do. A worker ant takes around 250 naps a day, each about a minute long, for close to 5 hours of sleep. A queen gets almost twice that. The naps happen at all hours, so a colony never fully shuts down.
That last part is why you can see ants on your counter at 2 p.m. and again at midnight. Below I’ll cover how ants sleep, whether they sleep at night, where they rest, and which ants around here are true night foragers.
How Do Ants Sleep?
Ants sleep in short bursts called polyphasic sleep. “Poly” means many, so it’s many small sleeps instead of one big one. The best numbers we have come from one study of red imported fire ants in a lab.
- Worker naps per day: about 250
- Worker nap length: about 1 minute
- Worker sleep per day: about 4.8 hours
- Queen naps per day: about 90, roughly 6 minutes each
- Queen sleep per day: about 9.4 hours
- Share of workers awake and working at any moment: about 80%
Those numbers come from researchers who filmed the ants around the clock and logged every nap.
In a 2009 study in the Journal of Insect Behavior, Cassill and colleagues at the University of South Florida filmed fire ant colonies around the clock. Workers had about 253 sleep episodes a day, each lasting about 1.1 minutes, for roughly 4.8 hours of sleep. Queens had about 92 episodes of around 6 minutes, for about 9.4 hours. At any given time, about 80% of the workers were busy grooming, feeding, or digging.
Keep in mind these figures come from one species in a lab. Nobody has timed carpenter ant or odorous house ant naps the same way. The pattern of many short naps is the part that likely holds across ants. The exact counts may not.
How to tell an ant is sleeping
You can’t see an ant close its eyes, since it doesn’t have eyelids. In the fire ant study, sleeping ants held a different posture from awake ones. They folded their antennae in and didn’t respond when other ants bumped them. In deep sleep, the researchers saw fast antenna twitches. They named it “rapid antennal movement” sleep, after REM sleep in people. Whether that means ants dream, nobody knows.
Do Ants Sleep at Night?
Not the way people do. In the Cassill study, the fire ants’ nap pattern didn’t change when the lights went on or off. Workers dozed for a minute, worked, and dozed again at every hour. So at night, some ants are sleeping and most are still up.
That matches what other lab work shows. When researchers at the University of Würzburg kept Camponotus carpenter ants alone in a dish, most showed a normal 24-hour body clock and were active mainly at night. Put back in the colony, the picture changed. Foragers shifted their schedule to match when food was offered, day or night. Nurse ants caring for the young worked around the clock with no clear day-night rhythm at all.
The takeaway: an ant colony runs on shifts set by the work, not by the sun. Food and temperature matter more than whether it’s dark.
Are Ants Nocturnal?
Some species are, but most ants that come into homes aren’t strictly nocturnal. Here is how the common ants in our area line up.
Carpenter ants: the night shift
Carpenter ants are the clearest night foragers in Northern Virginia and Maryland. Penn State Extension notes that the workers “usually emerge at night.” It suggests checking basements, attics, garages, and the outside of the house between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. from May through July. During the day, the workers stay tucked inside wood that is damp or already rotting. That’s why a homeowner can have carpenter ants for months and only notice them after dark. Our short guide to carpenter ants covers what to look for.
Odorous house ants and pavement ants: whenever it’s warm
Odorous house ants and pavement ants don’t follow a strict day or night pattern that I’ve seen documented. They forage when the temperature is right and there is food to find. If you’re seeing trails inside at all hours, the ants have found something worth the trip.
What do ants do at night?
The same jobs they do during the day. Some workers forage and haul food home. Nurses feed larvae and move the brood. Others dig, clean, or guard the entrances. A share of them are napping in one-minute shifts in between. The colony doesn’t send everyone back to bed at sunset.
Where Do Ants Sleep?
Inside the nest. In the fire ant study, workers napped longest on the ceiling and walls of their chambers. The center of the floor was where most feeding and grooming went on, so ants there got bumped awake more. Queens slept huddled together, and their touching kept their sleep cycles in sync.
Outdoor colonies near your house nest in soil, under mulch and stones, and along foundation cracks. Carpenter ants nest in wet or rotting wood. When ants live inside the walls, they rest in whatever void is warm and close to food and water.
Do ants go back to the nest at night?
Foragers return to the nest to drop off food, then head out again if there’s more to get. There’s no single “everyone home” moment. The trail you saw in the kitchen this afternoon may be quieter at night or busier, depending on the species and the temperature.
Why the Same Ants Keep Showing Up
Ants have been one of the most common complaints we get here in the spring. In my experience, most homeowners first notice them in the kitchen or the bathroom. When ants stick around one room day and night, there’s usually a reason they want to be there, and it’s often water.
Daren, one of our registered technicians, had an ant house that he and Lawrence, the technician who trained him, couldn’t figure out at first. They sprayed, set traps, and even pulled outlet covers and dusted the voids. That just pushed the ants to another area. Then Lawrence suggested checking the bathtub upstairs. The grout around the tub was cracked and leaking water down into the kitchen below, and that moisture was what kept the colony there. Daren says cracked grout and caulk around a tub is now one of the first things he checks. You can read more about that kind of problem in our guide to ants in the bathroom.
What Ant Sleep Means for Getting Rid of Ants
Because a colony is never fully asleep, there is no “quiet hour” when you can catch all the ants at once. Spraying the ants you see only reaches the workers out on the trail. The queen and most of the workers stay in the nest.
A review in the Annual Review of Entomology by Charlotte Helfrich-Förster of the University of Würzburg describes insect sleep the same way scientists describe it in mammals. Sleeping insects are harder to wake, their brain activity changes, and when they’re kept awake they sleep more later. That “sleep rebound” has been measured mostly in fruit flies and honey bees, not ants, but the review points to the same purpose: sleep keeps the brain working and supports memory.
For you, the practical point is simple. Something has to carry the treatment back to the ants you never see.
When we treat ants, we use non-repellent products that workers carry back into the colony. Every product is EPA approved and passed our internal research review, and we’ve dropped nine harsh chemicals from our lineup. We handle ants across the area, including ant control in Alexandria and ant control in Leesburg.
If you need help with ants, call us at 703-683-2000 or email info@bettertermite.com.
