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[Hideyoshi]

I got an interesting idea for a fortress to add a little challenge, but I don't know how well it would work if at all. I want to try and make my primary source of food cheese and meed for my drink of choice. Could I milk and collect honey fast enough to actually keep my dwarves fed?

[Eric Blank]

Not for many moons, I'd suspect.

Beekeeping especially can be slow and tedious. Set up a ton (literally) of hives immediately and have a (single) beekeeper collect all the wild bee hives on your map. The reason I'd suggest only letting one beekeeper work at a time is because there' some sort fo bug in which multiple beekeepers will all try to collect the same hive, preventing any of them from ever actually doing so. So they'll stand there for months on end until they're dehydrated and tantrumming as they run back inside to drink and die halfway there or get killed by an ambush or something.
Once they've all been collected, let them breed and the colonies be split until they're all occupied, then let only 1/5-1/4 of them be collected from. What I learned is that you can't afford to get overzealous about collecting products from all your hives, or you may wind up with periods of extreme shortages in the beekeeping industry.

And for milking; that'd be a hell of a lot of grazers to worry about. Might as well have some meat and bread☼Horse Intestine Bisquits☼ to go with your cheese. I'd suggest sheep, llamas, alpacas and pigs because of the lower grazing costs. Pigs don't graze at all, in fact. Maybe if you refuse to butcher any of them (except the sub-par males, because they're useless and contaminate the gene pool with their crappy genomes), ever, you'd be able to get a big enough population of pigs to keep the workshops milking and producing cheese non-stop without ever running out of animals to milk, buckets and barrels to hold the milk, and milk to process into cheese. I haven't been successful in getting a population that large before, though.

[Blue_J]

And for milking; that'd be a hell of a lot of grazers to worry about.

Much like leather, I've always found that cheese is probably best to import if you want it in any significant quantities. When you can buy a whole barrel of the stuff for the cost of one ☼marble earring☼, I'm not particularly likely to go through the hassle of managing a big herd of milk animals.

(Admittedly, leather is worse. Having to manage pastures for 11 animals just to get a leather outfit for one marksdwarf, when the human and dwarven caravans usually bring like 20 bins full of leather for around 60-70☼ each? I'll pass.)

[Drazinononda]

When you can buy a whole barrel of the stuff for the cost of one ☼marble earring☼, I'm not particularly likely to go through the hassle of managing a big herd of milk animals.

I got an interesting idea for a fortress to add a little challenge

Granted, should be spelled 'Challenge,' because cheese and mead are two of the slowest things in the game. Pretty sure you could send a single dwarf to forge an adamantine breastplate and a single dwarf to make a jug of mead, right from embark, and you'd have the breastplate first.

[Dwarfotaur]

I tried to embark and live off Eggs and Mead so I wouldn't need farms.

Eggs were fine. I had more eggs than I could do anything with.

Mead on the other hand... You need a ton of bees, a ton of hives, you need to micro them to breed/expand/or make honey, you need glazed jugs which will require something like clay and a fuel source, you need a screw press, etc etc... I don't even think I made 1 drop of mead before planting a load of plump helmets and swimming in dwarven wine.

[XXSockXX]

Mead is difficult to produce in large enough quantities. You can just make rock jugs, but the output is also limited after a certain number of hives (http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Beekeeping#Artificial_hive_limits), so getting enough booze for all dwarfs is only possible with a pretty low population.