okaaaay xD Note that mine don’t necessarily connect with any canon thing except for the Canterlot Wedding episodes. I haven’t read the comics and all that.
One headcanon of mine is one that I shall soon be implementing into Coccinelle - that a changeling queen can lay eggs from several things.
1 - Mating. She will choose a changeling from her hive to sire her little ones. This is the most common way eggs are laid, though the number of eggs resulting depends on the queen’s health and such.
2 - Love intake. If she is to feed on a LOT of love, like, she gets reaaaaaally full, she is able to lay eggs from it. There is no particular father to the resulting changelings, and it’s usually only one or two eggs rather than a full clutch, but it’s possible. As she does not have anyone to mate with, very soon in the blog Coccinelle will reveal she has laid a single egg (her very first) from all the love she’s receiving from her tumblr followers x3 (Though I had this in mind before the blog, this will give me a way to thank people for the 100+ followers I’ve gotten on her blog, but that’s just a convenient bonus xD))
Very nice!
For Papi’s canon only the Queen may produce eggs, and they must be fertilized by another changeling, be they natural or converted.
That being said, a Queen may implant a few eggs at a time into a willing drone should they want to ease the burden of a reproductive cycle. Though the egg is still the Queen’s, it will absorb essence from its carrier, and the changeling that fertilizes it, making the offspring closer to its ‘parents’ than the Queen, biologically.
As for love intake, though it doesn’t affect the production of eggs for Papi and her hive, it does affect their health. A well fed changeling is unlikely to fall ill, and is quick to recover from minor injuries. For the nymphs, the more love they intake the faster they will mature.