Disclosed in the invention is an ant colony algorithm-based high-energy efficiency wireless sensor network routing method. The method comprises three parts: cluster establishment, transmission in cluster, and transmission between clusters. When a multi-hop relay node is selected, a heuristic ant colony intelligent algorithm is employed to search a multi-hop transmission route; and during the searching process, an expectation importance influence is eliminated and a probability for node selection is completely decided by the link pheromone concentration. And when a local link pheromone is updated, a dump energy minimum value of a collaboration zone node is multiplied by link pheromone increasing degree Q and then the result is divided by transmission energy consumption, thereby completing updating. According to the new pheromone updating method, the dump energy and the transmission energy consumption of the node are scaled appropriately and then are introduced to the link pheromone updating; and when the dump energy of the collaboration zone node at the next hop is increased and the transmission energy consumption is reduced, the node can be selected. Therefore, when the routing method is used, total energy consumption of the network can be reduced; the dump energy of the network nodes can be balanced; and the working life of the network can be prolonged.