Routing algorithm based on ant colony optimization for wireless sensor networks has the ant colony algorithm characteristics of self-organization, the positive feedback and the parallelism, which has good performance in constructing the optimal routing. In this paper, the distance for stimulating factor is improved, the communication distance is introduced and the pheromone update methods having the rewards and punishment mechanism are adopted, which can make better use of residual energy for wireless sensor networks nodes, prolong life of network and guarantee the effect of the optimization algorithm.