It appears that I was injecting the properties into two different instances.
<util:properties id="queryProps" location="classpath:SQLs.xml"/>
<bean id="EmployeeDAO" class="pkg.dao.EmployeeDAOImpl">
<property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
<property name="queryProps" ref="queryProps" />
</bean>
Now the queryProps Property
contains the expected content from the SQLs.xml.