This end fits snugly into a colony whose entrance has been reduced to an auger hole 1 inch in diameter. The other end of the cone has a clear plastic bag attached to it to capture the responding bees. Inside the cone is a small patch of black velcro attached to an elastic string that serves as a target for the responding bees. We quantified nest defense behavior by first placing a cone trap without the black velcro patch in the colony entrance for 30 seconds. Next, we inserted a long plastic tube into the colony entrance, and exhaled into it three times.
Human breath serves as an excellent stimulus to provoke defensive behavior in honey bees.
We removed the tube and immediately placed the cone trap with the velcro patch in the colony entrance. After 30 seconds, we removed the cone trap and placed corks into the entrances of the colony and the trap. The sample of bees was placed into an ice chest, and the remaining colonies were sampled using the same procedure. All samples were frozen, and the bees were later identified as having either European or Africanized patrilines depending upon the color of their cuticle. The most defensive colonies in our experiment were those where the queen was mated to only Africanized drones.