Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are economically and ecologically important plant pollinators in agricultural and non-agricultural landscapes. Over the past decade, their increased exposure to natural and anthropogenic environmental stressors has been linked as the source of honey bee colony losses and decline of wild bee populations. These stressors impact the honey bee’s individual and social homeostasis by affecting its health and behavior, and disrupting its brain function and cognitive abilities. For these reasons, honey bees are an useful model organism to determine stressors’ effects in an organism’s nervous system and its motor output. Here, we performed immunohistochemistry assays on worker honey bee larvae reared in vitro to characterize the larval neuromuscular junction (NMJ) anatomy and synaptic release properties. We demonstrate that positive immunoreactivity of pre- and post-synaptic markers labeling allowed the localization of the honey bee larval NMJ synapses. Our findings are valuable for conducting studies on honey bee larval NMJ.
