a randy oliver snip... 
Saying she's OK is the thing.  There are those who pull and cage a queen as
soon as they see eggs.  But some of those queens will be drone layers, or
fail in the first week or so.  Queens used to be sold as "tested," meaning
that the producer saw a solid sealed brood pattern.  We don't normally see
that until about three weeks after putting in the cell.

my comments..
it should be noted that the days presented in the thread up to now has been from day of graft... this determination of when the clock start ticking can be a bit confusing to new comers that wish to rear queens.  

depending on time of season and weather the percent of drone layers itself can vary quite a bit and as far as how I do things here the period specified for proper mating I stretch just a bit (more like 16 days) and I pull cells at day 9 and not day 10 to 12.  as someone noted on occasions queen cells will emerge prematurely.  temperature and humidity seem to be primary variable in how the time line for grafting till emergence works out.

at the commercial level 'saying she is ok' is quite dependent on the experience level of the queen rearing crew.  very subtle difference to the skilled eye can somewhat limit the problem when it comes to placing the new queen in the introduction cage and shipping this off to the customer.  imho you do not want to buy queens from some outfit where the folks in the queen rearing crew are changing all the time. 

as far as I know from my reading the idea around the concept of 'tested' was introduced when the Italian honeybee became popular here in the US and folks did not know so much about the genetics of color and were confused when the queen's issue did not breed true to color.  I seem to recall there was about 4 level to distinguish a queens quality.  this system faded into oblivion when folks began to understand more about the genetics of color.  I do suspect a lot of queens are still sold based on color... ie she looks like an italian or as we withness here in Texas she looks like a buckfast < that is this has more to do with marketing and little to do with the actual kind of queen a person sells.  as far as I can recall of this system 'tested' had the meaning that that particular queens offspring had been observed as 'breeding true'.

Gene    

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