Abstract.A swarm intelligence algorithm develops rapidly, which has solved many large scale complex problems these years. Artificial bee colony algorithm is a new swarm intelligence algorithm and gets wide attention for its superior performance, such as, strong global convergence, greedy heuristic search feature and quickly problem solution. The biological background is introduced briefly; By comparing bees foraging behavior with problems solution, modeling thought is given; Algorithm model is introduced in detail. Then, research status quo is discussed from two aspects, improvement and application of the algorithm. Also, conclusions are given about artificial bee colony algorithm, and improvement direction and application field are put forward from the weakness analysis of algorithm.