You’ve heard about immersion therapy—but what about immersion photography? When Anand Varma was asked to photograph a story on honeybees for National Geographic magazine, he knew he was going to have to take a different approach to capture new views of one of the world’s most photographed insects.

As fortune would have it, Varma struck up a friendship in his hometown of Berkeley, California, with Alice Rosenthal, a local beekeeper. Rosenthal had a hive that was struggling to survive during the winter, so she proposed a solution: She and Varma would move the hive into a shed in his backyard. The hive would stay warmer, and Varma would get to know the bees inside.

“Being able to actually watch them in the