But doesn't the referenced article at
http://gears.tucson.ars.ag.gov/rf/pilot/index.html
mention:
"We used the Cordovan line of European honey bees so that we could tell our
European patriline (i.e., the daughters of the Cordovan drones)from the
Africanized (daughters of the Africanized drones) by the color of the
workers' cuticle. Cordovan bees have a distinctive light brown color."
I don't think that this should give us much of a hope for visual
identification unless we happen to keep cordovan Italians and see that they
get superceded; then we might know that test time is at hand. In the
experiment it seems like the color "guide" of the cordovans was strictly in
place only as a specific indicator among other distinctly Africanized
(non-cordovan colored) bees.
Bill D.