lucky you! And many thanks for this insight. I have been toying with the idea of making hard cheese for years, but have been put off by books supposedly supporting it, like River Cottage's handbook on it (no. 16 in the series) and the highly detailed American Farmstead Cheese. I should have looked in the pre-modern books!
lucky you! That's one ready made cake I am always happy to find in the shops come autumn, and it never survives till Christmas either
do chickens have an innate understanding that bees sting, or do they learn it? I've watched some watching bees (or hoverflies or other flies mimicking bees) and it looked like they were making a conscious decision not to grab them out of the air, but it's not clear to me how they know/ learn it. I've seen one take a blister beetle into its beak and then drop it, and the sampling process, which sometimes results in the sample being dropped/flung out, goes on with any novel food, but I've not seen any of them with something that looked like a bee-sting - unless once, many years ago, on Janeka, whose facial swelling at the time I thought might have been caused by a tick. Anyone know anything about this?
The recipe I use says sherry, brandy, rum, or milk for the liquid. I imagine quite a lot of other alcoholic beverages would work too. I used Amaretto for its first feed before wrapping.
That's one of those things I didn't appreciate till it's gone, like this year; didn't look it out before I needed it and now find I've mislaid it
Few other tins are big and sturdy enough to hold a Christmas cake.
I'd wager that it's an innate/instinctual understanding. Bear with me, I'm spouting a lot of this off from memory, and it's late at night so it might be a little clunky/ineloquent
. The "I sting! Don't eat me!" black and yellow stripes is (from what I understand) a pretty much cosmopolitan form of Müllerian mimicry, which is where multiple organisms with similar defenses evolve similar aposematic traits. Aposematism allows potential predators to develop, through learning (short term) and evolution (long term), an aversion to an unpalatable/dangerous potential prey animal. Müllerian mimicry strengthens this association further, because if many different stinging insects use the same signals to advertise their stinginess, then predators only have to form that association once to automatically avoid all those insects. This benefits all species involved, since most predators don't like being stung and most insects don't like being eaten. In the wild, red junglefowl encounter multiple yellow-and-black striped wasps and hornets, and even have significant range overlap with several members of the genus Apis, including the very cool (and notoriously defensive) Apis dorsata. So while they wouldn't naturally encounter Apis mellifera (the Western honey bee) it wouldn't surprise me at all if it fits the chickens' inbuilt schema of "bee."
, it's just a topic I really love. I'd have been an evolutionary biologist if I didn't love field work so much.My very favourite cheese ever (not something I say lightly - I REALLY like cheese!) is made by a guy who was self-taught. They made the first batch kind of by accident and when I found out it was available again, I ordered some online and he emailed me back at 6am to talk about cheese
(Alsop & Walker's Cheesemaker's Special, for anyone in the UK.)I've definitely noticed even young chicks that weren't raised by a broody will seem to ignore bees even when they'll happily chase huge bluebottles that are just as big and buzzy.
It wasn't for me - I am a details personSorry if this was too long winded
Thanks very much; what you wrote makes a lot of sense and points me in the right direction to dig further to try to catch up with you on this topic.
ooo -
- that's great inspiration for a Christmas present for another cheese-lover I know. You've even got me contemplating a daytrip to Borough Market for some edible Christmas shopping 
is that the youngsters who don't yet know their arse from their elbow, or old and wizened hens?
