>  Anyone have any ideas how to do that efficiently, which means in under 10 minutes per? 

When I worked for Shannon Wooten in 1982, we had the task of requeening every colony. The queens we used were brand new queens we had raised in nucs. I don't remember how many hives he ran but it could have been a thousand or more, plus thousands of nucs. The crew varied from 5 to 10 people, depending on how busy we were. More people were hired when needed to find and cage queens. In short, we were pretty good at finding queens. 

But back to technique. Number one: single story brood box. The hives were run in two stories in spring, with a zinc excluder between. Basically, you sat down on a stool by your hive, and looked at the nine frames one by one. Most times we found the queens in less than 5 minutes. If we didn't see her after looking at all nine frames twice, we would dump all the bees out of the hive in front of it and stare at them as the crawled back in. Then you'd see her.

When I ran my own bees, I used to shake a lot of bees for cell builders. I used a bee strainer made out of an empty super with a wire queen excluder nailed to the bottom. I would simply shake whatever bees I needed into this, with another empty beneath it to catch the bees as they were strained through the excluder. 

You can use one of these strainers to find queens pretty quickly. Of course, if you see her on the frame, you are done, and you don't need to shake 'em. I usually only use the strainer as a last resort for queen finding.

PLB

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