Sentence clustering plays a vital role in text mining and text processing activities. The proposed work is a novel hierarchical fuzzy relational clustering algorithm (HFRECA) capable of identifying sub clusters. It has features of both hierarchical clustering and fuzzy clustering in which it uses page rank to form multiple clusters present in text documents containing hierarchical structure. To enhance the quality of the clusters formed, an optimisation algorithm which is called artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is used along with it. The proposed algorithm identifies the sub clusters and finely tunes the cluster to show a better optimised result. Copyright © 2018 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.