This paper presents a stable control for a single link flexible manipulator. The flexible manipulator is considered as Euler–Bernoulli beam, and its dynamic model is developed based on assumed mode method. Position and vibration control are realised with a single controller as motor torque. The controller has three parameters that must be selected. In this paper, the main motivation is to find the suitable parameter values to generate optimum torque values in every sampling time. In order to achieve this goal, Artificial Bee Colony Algorithm is performed, and the controller parameters are optimised simultaneously in every sampling period. Simulations verify that the manipulator achieves the position control objective, and the vibration is suppressed simultaneously even with different payloads with the proposed optimisation method.