I posted this inquiry on the newsgroup but have not had any response so
I'll try here.
 
Weekend before last I put on the escape boards. One hive never moved down
out of the supers. A possible explaination would be the presence of brood
but having a queen excluder in place since late spring I didn't see how
this is possible. The excluder was put in place after i had brood in my
cut-comb super. Subsequent examinations revealed that the brood had hatched
and the cells full of capped honey.
 
Blew the bees out of the supers this weekend and I just happen to spot an
UNMARKED queen walking across the topbars. So now I look at the frames of
what used to be 100% sealed honey and there is brood of all stages on 2 of
the frames. Huh? A quick look into the deeps below the QX reveales that the
MARKED queen is indeed still there and laying.
 
So how do I end up with 2 laying queens, one on each side of the QX? I can
not offer up an explaination of how a laying queen could end up above the
excluder since there could not have been any eggs up there from which to
raise a queen. Is it possible that this queen hatched below (possibly a
supercedure), mated and then squeezed her skinny butt through the QX to
live happily ever after up in the honey supers? If so, why wouldn't she
have destroyed he old MARKED queen?
 
I hope I have provided all of the necessary parts of this biological
puzzle.
 
Geo.