Battery powered Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide critical solutions to a wide range of applications including environmental monitoring, wildlife management, human and object tracking, and surveillance systems. Recharging or replacing batteries is often difficult since sensors are often placed in areas which are difficult to access. Hence this technology requires sensor nodes to be as autonomic as possible. Moreover, multihop routing in WSN causes routing holes and shorter network life time. Biologically-inspired algorithms offer a new paradigm for naturally inspired solutions to problems arising in WSN. Ant routing, bee colonization and bee optimization algorithms have shown outstanding performance for WSN. Most of these bio-inspired algorithms are applied into autonomous networking for self-organization, self-healing, self-management, and others. In this paper, data harvesting from sensor nodes and energy provision in sensor nodes derived from the analogies of bee nectar harvesting and pollination respectively, are proposed with detailed mapping. Simulation and prototype results reveal that the bio-inspired mechanism can be a potential solution. © 2013 IEEE.