ZigBee devices and ZigBee wireless sensor networks (ZWSNs) are popularly utilized in developing monitoring and control (MC) applications. In this paper, a reliable data collection scheme with efficiency consideration for ZWSN-based MC systems is proposed. An empirical approach is adopted to tackle the issues of transmission reliability and data collection efficiency. Several experiments are performed to facilitate the analysis of factors that may result in packet losses and the measurement of data transmission times between ZigBee nodes. Therefore, a reliable data transmission method that contains mechanisms of receiving confirmation, retransmission for overdue, and retransmission for busy delay is developed to successfully solve the packet loss phenomenon. In addition, a new data collection scheme that utilizes the last-stage ZigBee router to perform polling to ZigBee end devices is proposed to effectively enhance the total data collection efficiency. In particular, the experimental results show that the total data collection time of our method can be 4.45 times lower than that of the traditional approach if there are 8 ZigBee routers and 8 ZigBee end devices in the MC system.