Grinding is the key link in the production of mineral processing, and mill load is an important parameter in the process of grinding, it is closely related to production efficiency and energy consumption. According to the characteristics of ball process with nonlinear, larger time-delay and time-varying, conventional PID control is difficult to obtain the expected control effect. Ant colony algorithm is a new bionic optimization algorithm, has strong robustness and good mechanism of distributed computing, easy to be combined with PID method. So this article puts forward PID parameter optimization based on ant colony algorithm, realize the stable control of ball mill for ore, the optimized control compared with traditional PID control, has better dynamic and static performance. Simulation results show that the method is practical and effective.