Technical Abstract: Despite their tremendous economic importance, honey bees are not a typical model system for studying general questions of insect physiology. This is primarily due to the fact that honey bees live in complex social settings which impact their physiological and biochemical characteristics. Not surprisingly, the questions which have attracted most attention by researchers working on physiology and biochemistry in general are core topics specifically related to social organization, such as caste development, reproductive division of labor and polyethism within the worker caste. Because the approaches to undertake such studies are highly specialized and not widely published, this chapter presents and discusses basic laboratory protocols to establish and standardize the means of addressing such questions in bees. Topics covered include protein analysis, hormone quantification, neurotransmitter detection, energy metabolism, thermoregulation and basic dissection techniques.