Automatic recognition of the digital modulation plays an important role in various applications. This paper investigates the design of an accurate system for recognition of digital modulations. First, it is introduced an efficient pattern recognition system that includes two main modules: the feature extraction module and the classifier module. Feature extraction module extracts a suitable combination of the higher order moments up to eighth, higher order cumulants up to eighth and instantaneous characteristics of digital modulations. These combinations of the features are applied for the first time in this area. In the classifier module, two important classes of supervised classifiers, i.e., multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network and hierarchical multi-class support vector machine based classifier are investigated. By experimental study, we choose the best classifier for recognition of the considered modulations. Then, we propose a hybrid heuristic recognition system that an optimization module is added to improve the generalization performance of the classifier. In this module we have used a new optimization algorithm called Bees Algorithm. This module optimizes the classifier design by searching for the best value of the parameters that tune its discriminant function, and upstream by looking for the best subset of features that feed the classifier. Simulation results show that the proposed hybrid intelligent technique has very high recognition accuracy even at low levels of SNR with a little number of the features.