Packages

For this post, we need to install and load the beeswarm package.

We can install it from CRAN using install.packages("beeswarm"). Then, we can load it:

# install.packages("beeswarm")
library(beeswarm)

Dataset

Since beeswarm plots are made to visualize individual data points, we need a dataset that contains numerical values. Here, we’ll use the iris dataset, which is a built-in dataset in R.

We can easily load it:

data(iris)
print(head(iris)) # display first rows

##   Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width Species
## 1          5.1         3.5          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 2          4.9         3.0          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 3          4.7         3.2          1.3         0.2  setosa
## 4          4.6         3.1          1.5         0.2  setosa
## 5          5.0         3.6          1.4         0.2  setosa
## 6          5.4         3.9          1.7         0.4  setosa

Most simple beeswarm

The package comes with a beeswarm() function that creates a beeswarm plot that can be used with only 1 argument: the numerical variable to visualize. Here, we’ll use the Sepal.Length variable from the iris dataset.

beeswarm(iris$Sepal.Length)

Flip the plot

We can easily flip the plot by setting the horizontal argument to TRUE (or vertical to FALSE):

beeswarm(iris$Sepal.Length, horizontal=TRUE)

Going further

In this post, we learned how to create a simple beeswarm plot using the beeswarm package. We used the beeswarm() function to create a basic plot.

You might be interested in how to custom the dots or how to display several groups on the beeswarm plot.

Related chart types

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Violin

Density

Histogram

Boxplot

Ridgeline