How to Determine if a Queen Emerged

After grafting queens for the first time, I was anxious to get into the nucs and get a count of how many emerged. Having never grafted before I wasn't sure if ANY would hatch. What I was expecting was to find either 1) An empty cell, indicating an emerged queen or 2) A dead queen cell that was never opened. Instead I found only empty cells.
Because I was checking the nucs less than a week after the hatch date, I knew that none of my queens would be mated (let alone laying). And I also knew that finding virgin queens would be time consuming at best and impossible at worst. But getting an accurate count was important. I needed to know if any of my nucs were hopelessly queenless. I was also selling nucs this year, which means that having a good estimate of emerged queens would let me know the count and the timing for sales.
Thankfully I noticed a few differences that helped me through this problem. In the nucs where I found virgins, all of the empty cells looked the same. They had the perfect circular cutout in the bottom of the cells, and the queen cell walls were still mostly intact. In the hives where I found queen cells (indicating no queen had hatched) the empty queen cells were entirely cleaned out. To me, this meant that workers had gone through and cleaned these cells entirely. My bees have a bit of a hygienic streak and they tend to clean dead cells. That's what had happened here.
I did have one nuc with no emergency cells and appeared to have no queen. In this case, I borrowed an emergency cell from another nuc where the queen hadn't emerged. I put the cell into a protector and shut up the nuc. When I came back later, she had emerged and was laying a great pattern.
#beekeeping
#beginnerbeekeeping
#grafting
#honeybee
#sidehustle
#queenrearing