playing with options: double cutdown split with combine?

[windfall]

What would happen if I did a cut down type split on 2 hives, and then combined the queenless remainders....would it be chaos?

Last summer I did a false swarm split on my long hive. Since the room was there I just put the old queen portion of the split on the far end of the hive..."temporarily"
well, temporary did what it often does (around here) and I never got around to moving it out. BY fall the 2 colonies completely filled out the long hive. Both sides survived winter well and have been growing quite fast. It is getting a little silly now with supers going on last week at each end just to provide some space for what are very packed hives going into an early spring bloom.

The plan is to move one side out ASAP. In the process I was going to steal a queen and some frames to stock an observation hive, and hopefully split out a strong nuc as well; but I am waiting for consistently warmer weather and drones flying for the queen(s) they raise to replace the ones I take.

One thought that has occurred to me is to take the existing queens and enough frames for the nuc and the OB hive. I could do this as a cut down split on both halves, then pull the follower boards and combine the remainder.....but how will the newly queenless combined hives react? Will it just be a mess since there is no existing queen to accept? or will they just team up nicely to raise a new one?

I could also just remove one side, and possibly have enough resources in it to fill the OBhive, and have two strong nucs (without queens). The hive left in the horizontal rig would get all those foragers back....unless I leave one nuc in the back end....but that's how this all got started.

Of course my limited experience and the bizarre spring complicate things some. The timing for a cut down split would be about now from what I understand (dandelions just starting, apple in 1-2 weeks) but things have gone cold, with 4-5 nights ahead in mid 20's and no drones flying yet.

any thoughts?