Over the years there have been many studies and experiments to maintain two queens in a hive. The idea is that two queens laying can/should produce twice as many workers which could/should result in a larger honey harvest. It seems to be certain that one really strong hive can produce more net honey that two weaker hives. Part of this has to do with the overhead of feeding larvae including the number of bees required to do so (bees feeding larvae aren't available to gather nectar) and the honey these voracious feeders consume is not available for storage.
There are, of course, practical difficulties to implement a two queen "household." The queens won't like it and will try to kill each other so they must be kept separate. In the conventional vertical arrangement of boxes in the hive one of the colonies will have to be atop the other. This means any manipulation of the lower colony will require removing the upper boxes which could get to be quite heavy and difficult to manage. I can find no sustaining two queen operations in searches of the Internet.
The challenge seems to be the same as trying to eat soup with a fork. The vertical hive system is not the way to go about it. On the other hand the horizontal hive system can accommodate two different colonies with ease. The concept is to separate the two ends of the long hive box, perhaps with just a queen excluder. The long entrance slot can easily be set up for two distinct entrances. But there are some management issues that need to be addressed.
Starting two colonies in a long hive should be easy enough but we expect (and desire) that both colonies should grow rapidly so that we could/should quickly run out of expansion room (twice as fast?). Here is my strategy to handle this.
I would expect to start in the early Spring with two over-wintered colonies (nucs?), put them both in a single long hive separated by a queen excluder and provide separate entrances. After a month or so with both queens laying, there should be twice as much brood in the long box as there would have been with only one queen laying. Of course, the bees in each half of the box will be working just as hard to feed the larvae. But suppose we remove one queen (to a new nuc for further propagation) along with, say, half her open brood and all her eggs and some of the capped brood. The new split should have a healthy start without harming the remaining colony in any way. In fact, the remaining colony will have several frames of capped brood that will soon be emerging (and maybe some larvae).
We would remove the queen excluder from the long box as it is no longer needed and the remaining bees will find a lower larvae load but with lots of extra capped brood that will soon be emerging - just in time for the Spring nectar flow. Hopefully, and this is the plan, this extra strong hive will pack in a ton of honey.
In mid-Missouri the timing could be as early as mid-March to find a warm enough day to unite the two nucs. Somewhere around mid-April we would be splitting one of the queens such that the new nuc could be strong enough to split again by early July to build up two new nucs to carry through winter for next year. The extra emerging brood will be coming into the hive in early to mid-May for a strong foraging force to collect nectar and to make lots of honey.
In the fall we can decide whether to carry the long hive through the winter or not. We will want to replace the old queen next Spring anyway so why feed her and her attendants all through the winter? Essentially the honey that we take is in the extra nuc for the younger queen. We have created two nucs to carry through the winter so the universe of bees is not diminished. On the other hand, if we decide to overwinter the long hive, we would only need one nuc to merge with them in the Spring to continue the two-queen strategy. We would still have to decide what to do with the old queen.
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