ARABI, La.-- A team of agriculturalists set out Monday to put traps within a half-mile radius of a storm-wrecked house confirmed last month to be infested with aggressive Africanized bees.

Agriculture and Forestry Commissioner Bob Odom said the traps will help determine whether the bees are established in the southeastern part of the state. The same type of traps are already used to monitor the progression of the bees in the western part of Louisiana, where they were first found in 2005, Odom said.

"So far, this is an isolated find in the New Orleans area," he said.

The bees, often called "killer bees," drove away contractors hired to tear down the house in Arabi, a St. Bernard Parish community that borders New Orleans. Then the bees drove off beekeepers called in to catch them.

Mosquito control workers killed the bees, and the state agriculture department confirmed in late December that they were hybrids with the aggressive African strain, Odom said.

He said it was the first confirmation of Africanized bees in a structure in the eastern part of the state. The bees probably did not come overland, Jimmy Dunkley, the department's coordinator of nursery and apiary programs, said last week.

Rather, he said, they probably were descendants of stowaways who arrived in New Orleans on a ship.

Nine swarms have been intercepted at ports since 1988, he said: six in New Orleans, two in Baton Rouge and one, this past October, at the Port of New Iberia. Some were in shipping containers, some in barges, and some in the ships themselves.

Africanized bees are the result of an experiment to increase honey production in Brazil. A swarm of the small, aggressive bees escaped the lab in 1957 and headed north. When they mated with native strains, the offspring turned out to be as aggressive as the African parents.

They reached Texas in 1990 and have spread west to California and east to Florida.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)