Diagram: beeswarm plot — Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)

chart

beeswarm plot

Non-overlapping offset points revealing local density.

Classification

chart
points and bubbles › dot strips
distribution; Financial Times Visual Vocabulary
the name evokes: nature

Channels

position on common scale; main: value
length; secondary: local density (lateral spacing)
spatial region; main: group

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 118 papers since 2019, 86% in the last five years; mostly in Medicine, Computer Science, Health Professions

R packages

R ggbeeswarm::geom_beeswarm(); GitHub 570 stars; last commit 2025-11

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(ggbeeswarm)
library(palmerpenguins)

p <- ggplot(penguins, aes(x = body_mass_g, y = species, colour = species)) +
  geom_beeswarm(size = 0.9, cex = 1.3, na.rm = TRUE) +
  scale_x_continuous(labels = lex_number, breaks = lex_break_breaks, expand = lex_break_expand) +
  labs(title = "Gentoo penguins are the heaviest",
       subtitle = "One point per penguin, pushed aside where values crowd",
       x = "Body mass (g)", y = NULL,
       caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "x", arrows = "x", break_not_zero = "x") +
  theme(legend.position = "none")

Sources (9)

20 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 3 books

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/beeswarm.html

ReferenceTaudière Adrien. 2026. beeswarm plot. In Visualization Vocabulary, version 1.0.0. IdEst. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/beeswarm.html

BibTeX

@incollection{taudiere2026-beeswarm,
  author    = {Taudière, Adrien},
  title     = {beeswarm plot},
  booktitle = {Visualization Vocabulary},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {1.0.0},
  publisher = {IdEst},
  url       = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/beeswarm.html},
  note      = {CC0 1.0}
}

Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-11-10. Images last changed on 2026-11-02. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.