Rapid development of modern communications has initiated essential requirements for providing efficient algorithms that can solve the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem in satellite optical networks. In this paper, the bee colony algorithm optimization based on link cost for RWA (BCO-LCRWA) is tailored for satellite networks composed of intersatellite laser links. In BCO-LCRWA, a cost model of intersatellite laser links is established based on metrics of network transmission performance namely delay and wavelengths utilization, with constraints of Doppler wavelength drift, transmission delay, wavelength consistency and continuity. Specifically, the fitness function of bee colony exploited in the proposed algorithm takes wavelength resources utilization and communication hops into account to implement effective utilization of wavelengths, to avoid unnecessary over-detouring and ensure bit error rate (BER) performance of the system. The simulation results corroborate the improved performance of the proposed algorithm compared with the existing alternatives.