The recent popularity of applications based on wireless sensor networks (WSN) provides a strong motivation for pursuing research in different dimensions of WSN. Node placement is an essential task in wireless sensor network and is a multi-objective combinatorial problem in nature. The positions of sensor nodes are very important and must be able to provide maximum coverage with longer lifetimes. So, for efficient node placement, a novel multi-objective Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm based framework is proposed in this paper. The framework optimizes the operational modes of the sensor nodes along with clustering schemes and transmission signal strengths. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperformed the contemporary methodology based on TPSMA, PSO and ACO.