Sensor nodes spend the most of their limited energy on communicating with environmental information gathered in receivers. Hence, it is important to determine the optimal monitoring sensor nodes and information flow paths to the destination and sink in order to survive the sensor networks. Additionally, the heavy traffic load for transferring packets in nodes closer to the sink increases energy consumption and reduces battery life. It is desirable to reduce the energy between nodes and sink. The main goal is to extend the network lifetime through extending the lifetime of operating sensors as well transferring gathered data from super node to the sink. In this paper, Bat Algorithm (BA) is used to select the optimum monitoring sensor node and resulted path to reduce energy consumption. Simulation results and comparison with other algorithms show the superiority of the proposed algorithm. The simulation results of the proposed algorithm show that the proposed algorithm has been able to reduce the power consumption of the network and increase the lifetime of the network. Also, the proposed algorithm is able to outperform the comparable algorithms on average by 27%. © 2013 IEEE.