Short-term electric load forecasting (STLF) is an essential tool for power generation planning, transmission dispatching, and day-to-day utility operations. A number of techniques are used and reported in the literature to build an accurate forecasting model. Out of them Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) are proven most promising technique for STLF model building. Many learning schemes are being used to boost the ANN performance with improved results. This motivated us to explore better optimization approaches to devise a more suitable prediction technique. In this study, we propose a new hybrid model for STLF by combining greater optimization ability of artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm with ANN. The ABC is used as an alternative learning scheme to get optimized set of neuron connection weights for ANN. This formulation showed improved convergence rate without trapping into local minimum. Forecasting results obtained by this new approach have been presented and compared with other mature and competitive approaches, which confirms its applicability in forecasting domain.