As the world’s economic activities are expanding, the energy comes to the fore to the question of the sustainable growth in all technological areas, including wireless mobile networking. Energyaware routing schemes for wireless networks have spurred a great deal of recent research towards achieving this goal. Recently, an energy-aware routing protocol for MANETs (so-called energy-efficient ad hoc on-demand routing protocol (EEAODR) for MANETs was proposed, in which the energy load among nodes is balanced so that a minimum energy level is maintained and the resulting network lifetime is increased. In this paper, an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) inspired approach to EEAODR (ACO-EEAODR) is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, no attempts have been made so far in this direction. Simulation results are provided, demonstrating that the ACO-EEAODR outperforms the EEAODR scheme in terms of energy consumed and network lifetime, chosen as performance metrics.