In recent years, internet technologies and its rapid growth have created a paradigm of digital services. In this new digital world, users suffer due to the information overload problem and the recommender systems are widely used as a decision support tool to address this issue. Though recommender systems are proven personalization tool available, the need for the improvement of its recommendation ability and efficiency is high. Among various recommendation generation mechanisms available, collaborative filtering-based approaches are widely utilized to produce similarity-based recommendations. To improve the recommendation generation process of collaborative filtering approaches, clustering techniques are incorporated for grouping users. Though many traditional clustering mechanisms are employed for the users clustering in the existing works, utilization of bio-inspired clustering techniques needs to be explored for the generation of optimal recommendations. This article presents a new bio-inspired clustering ensemble through aggregating swarm intelligence and fuzzy clustering models for user-based collaborative filtering. The presented recommendation approaches have been evaluated on the real-world large-scale datasets of Yelp and TripAdvisor for recommendation accuracy and stability through standard evaluation metrics. The obtained results illustrate the advantageous performance of the proposed approach over its peer works of recent times. © 2018, Springer-Verlag London Ltd., part of Springer Nature.