The job shop scheduling problem (JSSP) is an NP-hard problem of wide engineering and theoretical background. In this paper, a discrete artificial bee colony based memetic algorithm, named DABC, is proposed for solving JSSP. Firstly, to make artificial bee colony (ABC) suitable for solving JSSP, we present a food source as a discrete job permutation and use the discrete operation to generate a new neighborhood food source for employing a bee colony, an onlooker bee colony and a scout bee colony.