Honeyfields Simply Suet Blocks with Mealworms

A small bird burns through a serious share of its own body weight on a cold night and spends the whole of the next day earning it back. That arithmetic is why fat, rather than seed, is the thing that actually keeps a garden alive through a hard week in February — and why the blocks empty fastest exactly when you least want to be walking to the shop.

Suet blocks are packaged energy, and this one is honest about that in its numbers. Gross energy is 500Kcal per 100g against crude protein of 8.9%, so the emphasis is squarely on calories. The composition is cereals, oils and fats including ruminant tallow, seeds, ground peanuts, an insect fraction and various sugars, with preservatives and colourants declared as additives. Ten blocks to a pack, sold as a complementary feed rather than as a complete diet.

• 10 blocks per pack
• Gross energy 500Kcal/100g
• Crude protein 8.9%
• Cereals, oils and fats including ruminant tallow, seeds and ground peanuts
• Insects 0.5%, stated to be composed of 20% dried mealworms
• Preservatives and colourants declared; a complementary feed

About the mealworms. They are in the name on the front and they are 0.5% of the block. The label declares insects at 0.5% and says that insect fraction is composed of 20% dried mealworms — a fraction of a fraction, and the label does not do the multiplication, so neither will we. If you are feeding for insects, because you have got a brood of tits or a robin working hard, this is not the pack for it: it is a fat and cereal block that has met a mealworm. Two other things worth knowing before you buy — it contains ground peanuts and ruminant tallow, and no block dimensions have been supplied, so whether it drops into your existing suet cage is not something anyone can tell you in advance.

Who it's for: anyone feeding a garden through the cold months or the breeding season who would rather buy blocks by the box than one at a time, and who is buying an energy food and knows it.