An attempt is made to examine the effective application of artificial bee colony algorithm to optimize the parameters in load frequency control (LFC) of a two area interconnected thermal system. The proportional gains (Kp) and integral gains (Ki) have been optimized to ensure best performance of the system, minimizing the tie-line deviation and frequency deviations of both the areas. The settling time of the deviations have also been considered and the solution that gives best possible settling times for best possible fitness value has been accepted.