The Rice Fields Are Still Green. So Where Did the Small Lives Go?

Two Indonesian studies on stingless bees made me wonder whether our pursuit of food security is creating productive fields inside increasingly impoverished worlds.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

Nature did not feel like scenery when I was a child. It behaved more like a crowded neighbour.

Until I was eight or nine, my family lived in a government house provided for a village midwife in Ampelgading, the southernmost subdistrict of Malang Regency, East Java. The house itself was not especially reassuring. Whenever an earthquake came, it seemed ready to resign from architecture altogether.

For a child, however, the structural condition of the building was less interesting than the unruly world surrounding it.

Wildflowers appeared without anyone planting them. Chayote vines climbed behind the house and produced pale, trumpet-shaped flowers that I liked to pick. Mornings were busy with insects. Bees were among the creatures I often encountered, although I cannot now tell you which species they were.

Childhood memory is generous with colour and atmosphere, but rather unhelpful when asked to provide a proper taxonomic identification.

I did not remain in Ampelgading. When I entered junior high school, I moved to Turen and lived in a boarding house. There were still rice fields nearby, but Turen already felt more modern and urban than the place I called home. The distance was not enormous on a map, yet for a child it felt like crossing into another version of the world.

For senior high school, I studied at SMAN 8 Malang, firmly inside the city. Then I moved again to study at IPB University in Dramaga.

Dramaga sits close enough to Jakarta’s gravitational pull to feel connected to the capital, but the campus itself still carries a strong intimacy with the natural world. I once lived in a boarding house inside the IPB lecturers’ housing complex. Troops of monkeys regularly passed nearby, apparently unconcerned that they were crossing a university residential area rather than an ancestral forest corridor.

They had never received the campus regulations, or perhaps they had reviewed them and chosen not to comply.

These movements complicate my memories of nature.

Did insect life actually become quieter as I grew older? Or did I simply move from Ampelgading to increasingly urban landscapes? Was I witnessing ecological change, or was I becoming an adult who spent less time staring at flowers?

Now I live beside rice fields in Jombang, and the question has returned.

Jombang is not literally quiet. East Java has sound horeg, mobile walls of speakers powerful enough to make windows reconsider their professional commitments. The silence I mean exists underneath the bass. It is the apparent absence of buzzing, hovering, crawling, and wingbeats.

The fields are still green. The crops are still growing.

But sometimes the living world around them feels strangely thin.

A world needs more than its main characters

Perhaps Tolkien is partly responsible for the way this bothers me.

Middle-earth feels alive not merely because it contains heroic Men, a dangerous Ring, and several exceptionally long walks. It feels alive because it is inhabited by beings with radically different histories, abilities, timescales, and relationships with the land.

There are Hobbits who understand gardens and meals. Elves who experience time differently from mortals. Dwarves who read mountains as both home and resource. Ents who remember forests older than kingdoms. Eagles who see landscapes from above. There are also wolves, giant spiders, orcs, fungi, horses, and creatures that sensible travellers would prefer not to encounter.

Not every being in Middle-earth is gentle, useful, or interested in human survival. That is precisely the point.

A diverse world is not a collection of pleasant creatures arranged for our comfort. It is a web of beings performing different roles, sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing, and sometimes trying to eat one another.

Remove the Ents, Elves, Eagles, insects, forests, and wild things from Middle-earth, and the story might still contain Men, roads, fortresses, and grain. The map would remain recognisable. Yet the world would become flatter and less alive.

Agricultural landscapes can be reduced in much the same way.

We tend to focus on their main characters: the crop, the farmer, the pest, the fertilizer, the pesticide, the irrigation system, and the final yield. Everything else becomes background decoration.

But a field is also inhabited by soil organisms, decomposers, predators, parasitoids, pollinators, weeds, birds, reptiles, fungi, bacteria, and creatures whose importance may not become visible until they disappear.

A bee visiting a chayote flower behind a government house in Ampelgading may seem like a minor character. Yet flowers offer nectar and pollen, bees move genetic material, plants produce fruit, and humans benefit from an exchange they rarely witness.

Scientists call this an “ecosystem service,” which is a revealingly human phrase. Nature often receives serious attention only after submitting an invoice.

Two recent Indonesian studies on the stingless bee Tetragonula laeviceps made me wonder whether the quietness I sense has more than nostalgia behind it.

They do not prove that insects have declined around my home. They cannot reconstruct the mornings of my childhood. But they show how some of the chemicals used to protect crops can affect one of the small inhabitants helping agricultural worlds remain alive.

Three doors for a bee

This is usually the point where an article about science puts on a laboratory coat and starts reading tables aloud.

Let us try a different route.

Imagine a worker of Tetragonula laeviceps entering a room with three doors.

Behind the first door, the insecticide touches her body directly.

Behind the second, she lands on a surface where the chemical residue has dried.

Behind the third, the pesticide is hidden inside food.

These were the three exposure routes examined in the first study, conducted at IPB University. Researchers tested five commercial insecticide formulations containing indoxacarb, chlorfenapyr, flupyradifurone, and mixtures of indoxacarb with chlorfenapyr and abamectin with acetamiprid. They also examined what happened when each formulation was combined with a spray adjuvant, an additive used to improve spreading, adhesion, or penetration (Mubin et al., 2025).

From a farmer’s perspective, these products exist for understandable reasons. Pests can destroy months of labour and threaten household income. Farmers do not necessarily spray because they have declared war on biodiversity. They spray because something is eating the crop, time is running out, and the most readily available solution often comes inside a bottle.

The difficulty is that “pest” and “beneficial insect” are human categories.

An insecticide molecule does not pause for a meeting of the Council of Elrond before deciding which insect belongs to the enemy.

At the tested recommended concentration of 200 parts per million, flupyradifurone killed every exposed bee through all three doors: direct contact, dried residue, and contaminated food.

The abamectin-acetamiprid formulation produced 100 percent mortality through residue and oral exposure, and 83 percent mortality when applied directly. The indoxacarb-chlorfenapyr mixture caused 100 percent mortality through direct topical exposure.

The researchers also calculated LC50 values, meaning the concentrations expected to kill half the exposed bees under the experimental conditions. For flupyradifurone, the LC50 was only 0.35 ppm through topical exposure, 0.73 ppm through residue, and 0.94 ppm through contaminated food. All were far below the recommended concentration tested in the study.

Then the researchers added the adjuvant.

An adjuvant is supposed to help the pesticide spread, adhere, or penetrate more effectively. Unfortunately, its enthusiasm is not always limited to the intended target.

When the adjuvant was included, several formulations became even more toxic. The oral LC50 of flupyradifurone fell from 0.94 to 0.21 ppm. For the abamectin-acetamiprid mixture, it dropped from 5.35 to 0.15 ppm.

This matters because pesticides do not enter real fields as isolated names in a chemistry textbook. Farmers apply commercial formulations, additives, and sometimes mixtures. If risk assessments examine only the principal active ingredient, they may overlook supporting actors that significantly alter the ending.

Saruman, after all, was dangerous not simply because he existed, but because he combined knowledge, machinery, and an alarming confidence that every part of the living world could be reorganised for production.

The bee that still approaches

The second study placed four more insecticides along the bee’s path: carbosulfan, clothianidin, diafenthiuron, and tetraniliprole.

Once again, the researchers measured mortality through residues and contaminated food. But they also asked a more unsettling question.

Could the bees recognise danger and avoid it?

Individual bees were placed inside a Y-shaped olfactometer. At the end of the two branches were different odour sources, including sucrose, insecticide, or sucrose mixed with insecticide.

It sounds almost like a small quest: two roads diverge, one smells of food, and the traveller must choose.

The bees generally spent longer near sucrose. Exposure affected how long they remained near particular odours. Yet the frequency with which they approached insecticide-related odours was not significantly different from their approaches to sucrose.

They appeared able to detect that something was different, but not reliably enough to keep themselves away (Audia et al., 2025).

That may be the quietest horror in either study.

A bee does not need to prefer poisoned food. She only needs to keep returning to it.

Clothianidin was especially toxic. Its residual LC50 was 0.09 ppm, while its oral LC50 was 0.41 ppm. The recommended concentration examined in the study was 300 ppm.

Carbosulfan was less toxic than clothianidin but was still classified as highly toxic and hazardous. Its LC50 values were 31.28 ppm through residue and 28.51 ppm through oral exposure.

Diafenthiuron and tetraniliprole produced considerably higher LC50 values and were classified as relatively low-risk to T. laeviceps under the study’s conditions.

That difference is important. “Insecticide” is not one ecological personality. Some compounds are more hazardous to this bee than others. When chemical intervention is genuinely necessary, choosing more selective and less harmful options can reduce ecological damage.

Death was not the only possible ending.

Bees exposed to clothianidin or high concentrations of carbosulfan consumed less food. An insect may survive an exposure and still lose part of its ability to eat, forage, navigate, distinguish floral odours, or return to its colony.

For a social bee, the story does not end with the individual worker. Nectar and pollen are carried home. Food is exchanged among colony members. A contaminated forager may therefore bring the chemical into a community whose other members never visited the sprayed field.

In Tolkien’s stories, one traveller can carry an object capable of changing the fate of an entire realm.

A returning bee carries something much smaller. The principle of connection, however, is uncomfortably familiar.

Beacons, not a complete map

Urgency is necessary, but it does not give us permission to make the studies claim more than they do.

Both were laboratory experiments. They used groups of worker bees under controlled exposure conditions and observed acute effects over 48 hours. The first study commonly used ten bees per treatment with three repetitions. The second used four groups of ten bees for the mortality tests and fifteen bees for each olfactory comparison.

A laboratory LC50 is not a measurement of how much pesticide every bee encounters in a real rice field.

Likewise, the concentration inside a spray tank is not identical to the dose eventually reaching a bee after dilution, drift, rainfall, sunlight, plant absorption, degradation, and the bee’s own behaviour.

These studies do not prove that pesticides caused the apparent quiet around my home in Jombang. They do not document a national decline in pollinators. They cannot tell us how whole colonies respond across seasons to repeated low-dose exposure, habitat loss, food scarcity, disease, extreme heat, or combinations of these pressures.

They are warning beacons, not a complete map of Middle-earth.

In The Lord of the Rings, the beacons of Gondor do not explain the location of every enemy, the condition of every road, or the outcome of the war. Their purpose is simpler: something serious is happening, and those who see the signal must decide whether to respond.

These studies perform a similar function.

They demonstrate that several commercial insecticide formulations can kill T. laeviceps at relatively low concentrations under laboratory conditions. They show that adjuvants may intensify toxicity. They suggest that bees may continue approaching contaminated food despite detecting differences in odour. They also identify compounds that appear less hazardous than others, giving pest-management decisions a practical place to begin.

The next step is to follow the bees outside the laboratory.

Indonesia needs semi-field and field trials, realistic measurements of residues, chronic and sublethal exposure studies, colony-level observations, seasonal monitoring, and comparisons among native pollinator species. Risk assessments should examine commercial formulations, adjuvants, and mixtures that farmers actually use.

Native stingless bees should also occupy a more visible place in pesticide registration and stewardship. Much pollinator risk assessment has historically relied on the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera. That species is useful as a reference, but Indonesia’s pollinator community is not a single imported protagonist wearing different costumes.

Food security inside a living world

In January 2026, President Prabowo Subianto’s administration announced that Indonesia had achieved food self-sufficiency in 2025. The government reported increased rice production, large national rice stocks, and no imports of consumption rice during that year (Cabinet Secretariat of the Republic of Indonesia, 2026).

That achievement matters.

Dependence on imported food can make a country vulnerable. Farmers deserve policies that improve production, income, infrastructure, technology, and bargaining power.

Yet agricultural success is usually narrated through highly visible nouns: fertilizer, irrigation, machinery, land optimization, planted area, and tonnes harvested. In October 2025, Agriculture Minister Andi Amran Sulaiman highlighted simplified fertilizer distribution, irrigation rehabilitation across roughly two million hectares, mechanization, expansion of productive land, and the ambition to make Indonesia a global food estate (Cabinet Secretariat of the Republic of Indonesia, 2025).

These are legitimate components of agricultural policy.

My concern is with the characters who vanish outside that frame.

A field is not productive only because humans deliver sufficient inputs. Production also emerges from relationships among soil organisms, natural enemies, pollinators, water, vegetation, weather, and farmers’ decisions.

This is where fiction can make biodiversity easier to understand.

Middle-earth would be a much poorer world if it contained only Men. Narnia would lose much of its wonder if its forests were reduced to timber and its animals to livestock. Even the wizarding world of Harry Potter depends on the idea that humans are surrounded by lives, habitats, and forms of intelligence they do not fully understand.

The comparison is not meant to romanticise nature. Real ecosystems contain disease, predation, crop pests, parasites, and things every bit as unpleasant as Shelob.

Biodiversity does not require farmers to surrender their crops to every organism with an appetite.

It asks us to recognise that not every insect is the same, not every plant outside the crop row is useless, and not every successful field can be judged by yield alone. Integrated pest management begins with those distinctions. It asks what organism is present, whether its population has crossed an economic threshold, what natural enemies are already working, and which intervention causes the least unnecessary disruption.

A functioning agricultural landscape needs different ecological roles, just as Middle-earth needs more than one race or kingdom. Ents cannot replace Hobbits. Eagles cannot perform the work of earthworms. A parasitoid cannot pollinate a chayote flower, and a stingless bee cannot suppress every crop pest.

Diversity is not redundancy. It is a division of ecological labour.

Globally, animal pollination contributes to the reproduction of nearly 90 percent of wild flowering plant species and affects more than three-quarters of major crop types to some degree (IPBES, 2016).

Rice is primarily wind-pollinated, so protecting bees will not directly solve every food-security problem. But Indonesian agriculture is larger than rice. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, plantation crops, and the wild vegetation supporting agricultural landscapes depend on more complex ecological networks.

Indonesia does not have to choose between food sovereignty and biodiversity. Its Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan for 2025–2045 already calls for biodiversity to be integrated into development. The unresolved challenge is turning that principle into ordinary agricultural decisions.

A credible pollinator strategy could begin by including native bees in pesticide risk assessment, extension materials, field monitoring, and product stewardship. Commercial formulations and adjuvants should be examined, not merely isolated active ingredients.

Applications during flowering and peak foraging periods should be restricted when highly hazardous products are involved. Spraying at night may reduce direct contact with daytime foragers, but it cannot erase persistent residues or protect nocturnal insects by magic.

Integrated pest management must also mean more than replacing one bottle with another. It requires pest surveillance, action thresholds, selective interventions, biological control, resistant varieties, habitat management, and greater crop and landscape diversity.

Flowering field margins, hedgerows, nesting sites, mixed crops, and patches of natural vegetation can provide food and shelter for pollinators and natural enemies. FAO guidance treats such features, together with reduced pesticide risk, as parts of resilient and productive agriculture rather than land wasted on untidiness.

We should measure these things too.

A programme reporting hectares planted, fertilizer distributed, machines delivered, and tonnes harvested could also monitor pollinator diversity, pesticide risk, natural-enemy abundance, and habitat retained.

What institutions count has a habit of becoming what institutions protect.

Listening beneath the noise

I still cannot prove that Ampelgading contained more insects during my childhood than the landscapes I inhabit today.

Perhaps the difference lies in geography. Ampelgading, Turen, central Malang, Dramaga, and Jombang are not interchangeable environments. Perhaps I noticed more insects because I was smaller, had fewer responsibilities, and stood closer to the flowers.

Perhaps both the landscape and the observer have changed.

Science cannot convert memory into evidence. It can, however, tell us when a memory points towards a question worth investigating.

The two studies do that.

They show small Indonesian bees encountering pesticides through their bodies, through residues, and through food. Some die. Some consume less. Some continue approaching what may harm them. Contamination can potentially travel home with a worker into the colony.

Throughout all of this, the field may remain green.

That is what troubles me.

A landscape can retain its colour while losing parts of its story. Middle-earth would still appear green on a map after the Ents disappeared. The Shire could retain its fields while becoming less recognisably itself. Ecological impoverishment does not always arrive with black smoke and a dark tower.

Sometimes it arrives quietly, one missing buzz at a time.

The government house in Ampelgading seemed fragile whenever the earth shook, but the living world surrounding it felt abundant. Today, our buildings are sturdier, our machines more impressive, and our agricultural targets more precisely calculated.

I am less certain about the invisible structure holding the landscape together.

The next time I stand beside the rice fields in Jombang, I want to listen beneath the engines, irrigation pumps, motorcycles, and occasional assault of sound horeg.

I want to hear wing traffic.

A productive field should not merely look alive.

It should be allowed to sound alive too.

References

Audia, B. H., Buchori, D., Dadang, & Raffiudin, R. (2025). Toksisitas dan dampak empat insektisida sintetik terhadap sintasan dan perilaku makan lebah tanpa sengat Tetragonula laeviceps Smith (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Meliponinae) [Toxicity and impact of four synthetic insecticides on survival and feeding behavior of stingless bees Tetragonula laeviceps Smith]. Jurnal Entomologi Indonesia, 22(3), 197–208. https://doi.org/10.5994/jei.22.3.197

Cabinet Secretariat of the Republic of Indonesia. (2025, October 9). Gov’t carries out agricultural reforms to achieve food self-sufficiency. https://setkab.go.id/en/govt-carries-out-agricultural-reforms-to-achieve-food-self-sufficiency/

Cabinet Secretariat of the Republic of Indonesia. (2026, January 7). President Prabowo announces Indonesia food self-sufficiency. https://setkab.go.id/en/president-prabowo-announces-indonesia-food-self-sufficiency/

Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. (2016). Summary for policymakers of the assessment report on pollinators, pollination and food production (S. G. Potts, V. L. Imperatriz-Fonseca, H. T. Ngo, et al., Eds.). Secretariat of IPBES. https://files.ipbes.net/ipbes-web-prod-public-files/spm_deliverable_3a_pollination_20170222.pdf

Ministry of National Development Planning/National Development Planning Agency. (2024). Indonesian Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan 2025–2045. https://perpustakaan.bappenas.go.id/e-library/file_upload/koleksi/dokumenbappenas/konten/Upload%20Terbaru/IBSAP%202025-2045.pdf

Mubin, N., Dewanthi, S. A., & Audia, B. H. (2025). Evaluasi toksisitas insektisida sintetik terhadap lebah Tetragonula laeviceps Smith: Ancaman bagi penyerbuk di pertanian [Toxicity evaluation of synthetic insecticides on Tetragonula laeviceps Smith: Threats to pollinators in agriculture]. Jurnal Entomologi Indonesia, 22(2), 92–104. https://doi.org/10.5994/jei.22.2.92

Disclaimer

I write here in a personal capacity. The views expressed are my own and do not represent the official position of BBPPTP Surabaya or Indonesia’s Ministry of Agriculture.