The following is from the Root's 1908 ABC & XYZ of Beekeeping. When reading it you have to keep in mind when they say deep, they mean Jumbo and when they say shallow, they mean the standard 9.625" depth Langstroth. They mention "tiering up" with the Langstroth boxes (what we now call deeps). Back in the 1980s I had almost 500 colonies and used only the standard deeps for brood and honey, no queen excluders. Now, I use two standard deeps plus 3 mediums on average during the honey flow. I have seen a lot of beekeepers that confine the queen to the first story with an excluder, they swear that's enough room for a good queen. My feeling is that the two story 9.625" Langstroth hive became standard because it is bigger than any one story 

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THE LANGSTROTH FRAME AND HIVE, AND WHY THEY BECAME THE STANDARDS.   

A shallow frame permits the use of a low flat hive that can easily be tiered up one, two, three, and four stories high. This is a great advantage when one is running for extracted honey, for all he has to do when the bees require more room is to add upper stories as fast as the bees require them, and then at the end of the season extract at his leisure. Square or deep hives can not be tiered up very high without becoming top heavy and out of convenient reach of the operator.  The long shallow frame is more easily uncapped because the blade of the uncapping-knife can reach clear across. The shape of the Langstroth frames favors an extractor of good proportion. A deep frame is not as easily lifted out of a hive; is more liable to kill bees in the process of removing and inserting frames.  

There is another class of bee-keepers who feel that the Langstroth is not quite deep enough, and who, therefore, prefer the Quinby. They argue that ten such frames, or frames Langstroth length, and two inches deeper, are none too large for a prolific queen, and that these big colonies swarm less, get more honey, and winter better. Of these latter, I shall have more to say under the subject of “ Large vs. Small Hives.”  The Dadants have always insisted that their ten-frame Quinbys, when compared with the ten-frame Langstroths, averaged up year after year, would give far better results, both in honey and in economy of labor. This opinion is not based on the experience of two or three years, but on a period covering a good many years. The large hives, they claim, swarm less, produce more honey, and winter better. If I am correct they do not, at their home yard at least, have to exceed two per cent of swarming, and their average has been maintained year after year. Apparently the colonies in these large hives have very little de sire to swarm; but when they do swarm the swarms are enormous.  

OBJECTIONS TO LARGE HIVES. 
Their size renders them both heavy and unwieldy. They cost more money—about twice as much if made as shown in the engraving of the Dadant hive. It is difficult, in the first place, to get good clear lumber wide enough to make these deep hives ; and then when they are made, and are full of bees and honey, it is not practical to move them about much. The Dadants, for instance, leave these large hives on their stands all summer and winter, both at the home and out yards. They find it more practical to do so; and even when wintering on their summer stands in single-walled hives, their loss, I believe, just about equals the slight increase they have in swarming. These large frames are not nearly as easy to manipulate as the shallow Langstroth. It takes longer to get them out of the hive, and during the operation there is more danger of killing bees.

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