Proportional-Integral-Derivative(PID) control is widely used in DC motor system, because of its simple structure, high reliability and so on. However, the parameters of PID controller is commonly tuned by manual method and it also has large overshoot phenomenon for nonlinear and time-varying systems. So it is difficult to get ideal control effect. In order to overcome the defect of PID whose parameters are difficult to determine, artificial bee colony(ABC) algorithm has been proposed and applied to optimize the parameters of PID controller for DC motor in this paper. The simulation has been done and the results show that ABC algorithm can be efficiently employed to solve the proposed optimization problem.