My long hive is like that. The queen has no problem laying in what equals almost 5 brood boxes. It's a really big hive. In a couple weeks I'm going to build more boxes and order frames to do a split from it. It's cool to have a big hive, sort of. But last year it grew really big, stored lots of honey fast, then had to eat it all up because of rain. Where as the smaller normal size hive actually had more honey to give me after all the rain.
Maybe after I do the split though, and give that hive bunches of fresh frames it'll take off and store lots of honey. It'll be interesting to see, since that hive will have all the workers..... minimum of 22 fresh frames.... but have to build up all that wax before storing honey. Hmm. We'll see how it goes.
Beth