Advice for inspections

[Zante]

Zante: You usually graft larvae not eggs (not sure anyone grafts eggs these days although I think Brother Adam tried it out).
Honyebee eggs glow under dark (UV) light. You can get LED dark light torches (for spotting urine stains left by your cat on carpet) which can make the job of seeing eggs a little easier. To see eggs need to angle the comb so that light reflects from the bottom of the cells.

You are right, my bad, it was a larvae. It was just to say that seeing small specks in a cell isn't a problem, and isn't the issue here.

I was looking on some advice on how to deal with the overdrawn comb to make inspections easier on the bees and therefore on myself. I was wondering whether spacing the old overdrawn comb with foundation could relieve the issue and once the foundation is drawn replace the old overdrawn comb with more foundation, and whether to do this one frame at a time would be better, as it would keep the nest less spread out.

The thing of seeing the eggs was just something impeded by the bees being annoyed by my inexperienced handling of awkward comb.
(By the way... a sting on a scar is particularly annoying, let me tell you...)

 

[drex]

Overdrawn comb? Is the surface of the comb flat or do you have hills and valleys? If hills and valleys, your foundation idea would not help, as comb would be drawn out to within a bees pace of the facing comb, giving you valleys and hills. As stated before, it all depends on correct bee space. With castellations you have to lift the comb up out of the notch, before you can move it away from the opposing comb face. That lifting is enough for bumpy bits on the comb to rub against each other. That is why most people use runners and a dummy in brood boxes, so that a frame can be moved sideways, away from the opposing comb, before lifting.

 

[Zante]

It's fairly flat, but deeper than I've normally seen. It's drawn a bit past the top bar and the space between the faces of each comb is enough only for one bee, so when I pull one up the bees on the two neighbouring faces are bumped with the ones on the frame I'm pulling up. I have to pull them up slowly to give time to the bees to move out of each other's way.

 

[Gilberdyke John]

It's fairly flat, but deeper than I've normally seen. It's drawn a bit past the top bar and the space between the faces of each comb is enough only for one bee, so when I pull one up the bees on the two neighbouring faces are bumped with the ones on the frame I'm pulling up. I have to pull them up slowly to give time to the bees to move out of each other's way.

If you follow the advice to use runners and get rid of the castellations the problem will go away.

 

[Zante]

Now all of the foundation I've given them has been drawn, and my, do they like tight spaces. They've drawn some of the old comb even further, you can see the rings of white wax on the black one, and they've already overdrawn the foundation I've given them (btw, supers with foundation went on today on both hives).
Also they seem to be quite fond of brace comb as they've lost no time building bridges between the frames, and I'm always scraping wax off the bottom of the crown board.

I suppose that'd be good in supers, more storage in each, but that makes pulling frames out of the brood box a pain, especially with the heavy dadant frames.

I very much suspect that if I were get rid of castellations, remove a frame and distance them a bit, they'd draw those 9 frames even more to get back to the tight spaces they seem to favour. What do you think?