Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) has recently been explored to develop a novel algorithm for distributed optimization and control. This paper proposes an ABC-based Load Frequency Control (LFC) design to enhance the damping of oscillations in a two-area power system. A two-area non-reheat thermal system is considered to be equipped with proportional plus integral (PI) controllers. The proposed design problem is formulated as an optimization problem. ABC is utilized to search for optimal controller parameters by minimizing a time-domain based objective function. The performance of the proposed controller has been evaluated with the performance of the conventional PI controller, and PI controller tuned by genetic algorithm (GA) in order to demonstrate the superior efficiency of the proposed ABC in tuning PI controller. Simulation results emphasis on the better performance of the optimized PI controller based on ABC in compare to optimized PI controller based on GA and conventional one over wide range of operating conditions, and system parameters variations