A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an autonomous system of mobile hosts (nodes) connected by a wireless link. However, the problem of designing routing protocols poses challenges to researchers due to the unpredictable and dynamic nature of ad hoc networks. Hence, bio-inspired algorithms are widely used to design adaptive routing strategies for MANETs. This paper proposes a routing protocol based on the hybridisation of ant colony optimisation (ACO) and 2-opt heuristic with the optimisation of ACO parameters. Given the vast scope of the parameters, a genetic algorithm is used to minimise the complexity of the problem. The implementation of the method is realised by MATLAB. To valid the results in terms of the quality of service parameters (i.e., normalised overhead load, end-to-end delay and throughput), a comparison was conducted using the ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing protocol.