BUREAU OF ENTOMOLOGY AND PLANT QUARANTINE 63 
to the bees, but pollen supplement "cakes" made from it tended to 
harden sooner. Such sterilization is especially desirable when 
trapped pollen is used in feeding pollen supplement. 
Honey Bee Sex Now Determinable in Early Larval Stage 
A technique developed during the past season for distinguishing 
male and female honey bee larvae no more than 12 hours old will be 
utilized in a continued search for adult biparental male honey bees. 
Such males have never been discovered although theoretically possible. 
By means of this technique the search will be extended to include early 
larval stages. A "biparental" male would be a drone that developed 
from an egg and 9perm, both of which contain the same sex allele. 
The indications are that such a union of like sex alleles results in 
failure of the egg to develop into an adult bee. Normally the drone 
develops from an unfertilized egg. 
Hairless Honey Bee Mutation Found 
A new honey bee mutation, apparently previously undescribed, has 
been found. It has been named "hairless" because of the almost com- 
plete absence of hairs on the bee's body. Preliminary tests indicate 
that this characteristic is linked with an eye color. A stock of the 
new mutation has been established and its linkage with other muta- 
tions and sex is being studied. This increases to six the number of 
mutant stocks on hand. 
Two-Queen Colonies Outproduce Those With Single Queen 
Proper methods of profitably managing two-queen colonies were 
studied in cooperation with the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment 
Station. Although the difference in yield between single- and two- 
queen colonies was not as great in 1952 as in some previous years, 18 
two-queen colonies produced an average of 216 pounds of honey each 
as compared with an average of 143 pounds for 20 single-queen 
colonies. 
Bees Prefer Cane Sugar Sirup to Any Other 
_ Tests with caged worker bees showed that the bees prefer cane sugar 
sirups to sirups made of dextrose, dextrose and saccharin, levulose, 
levulose and saccharin, maltose and saccharin, or sirups made of equal 
quantities of levulose, lactose and sucrose, of dextrose, lactose, and 
sucrose, or of levulose and sucrose. This indicates that the bees pre- 
ferred cane sugar sirup to sirup from simple sugars or various com- 
binations of sugars. Saccharin appeared to make dextrose more 
desirable and levulose less desirable. The addition of saccharin to 
maltose sirup did not increase the desirability of the latter. Addition 
of powdered propolis appeared to make cane sirup more desirable than 
cane sirup alone, whereas the addition of saccharin had practically no 
effect. 
Unheated Hives Equal to Those Electrically Heated 
Package bees installed April 14, 1952, in electrically heated hives, 
in which a temperature of 85° F. was maintained, appeared to hold up 
