A novel transfer bees optimizer for reactive power optimization in a high-power system was developed in this paper. Q-learning was adopted to construct the learning mode of bees, improving the intelligence of bees through task division and cooperation. Behavior transfer was introduced, and prior knowledge of the source task was used to process the new task according to its similarity to the source task, so as to accelerate the convergence of the transfer bees optimizer. Moreover, the solution space was decomposed into multiple low-dimensional solution spaces via associated state-action chains. The transfer bees optimizer performance of reactive power optimization was assessed, while simulation results showed that the convergence of the proposed algorithm was more stable and faster, and the algorithm was about 4 to 68 times faster than the traditional artificial intelligence algorithms.