To track the real changes of dynamic target DOA(Direction of Arrival) quickly and accurately,the artificial bee colony theory and a corresponding algorithm are used to optimize the likelihood function and to implement the real time tracking of dynamic target DOA.First,an adaptive subspace updating algorithm with a variable forgetting factor is proposed,which could adjust adaptively the weights of current and historical data in a covariance matrix according to the DOA change speed and could obtain a smaller stable error while a better tacking speed.Then,by making use of the maximum likelihood algorithm with superior performance,this method avoids the repetitious feature values and singular value decomposition in the subspace tracking algorithms.Finally,the artificial bee colony algorithm is used to optimize the likelihood function and to reduce the computation of the algorithm.Experimental results on sampling in singe snapshot indicate that the Root Mean Square Error(RMSE) of DOA estimation is 0.995 2° under tracking estimation two signal sources with a SNR of 0 dB.It satisfies the requirements of design for target tracking method in an array signal processing.