Although it is commonly thought that ants always work and never sleep, research on fire ant sleeping patterns proves otherwise. It has been uncovered that workers had an average of 253 ‘sleep episodes‘ a day, that lasted an average of 1.1 minutes, for a total of approximately 4.8 hours of sleep overall. Whereas fire ant queens only experienced 92 sleep episodes, but each lasted an average of 6 minutes, for a total of 9.4 hours of sleep overall. ()Some ants are more active during the day ‘diurnal‘, some at night ‘nocturnal‘. Also during hibernation, some ants may sleep for around four months!
