Beeswarm

Authors

[Editor] Hu Zheng;

[Contributors]

Modified

2026-01-17

Note

Hiplot website

This page is the tutorial for source code version of the Hiplot Beeswarm plugin. You can also use the Hiplot website to achieve no code ploting. For more information please see the following link:

https://hiplot.cn/basic/beeswarm?lang=en

The beeswarm is a noninterference scatter plot which is similar to a bee colony.

Setup

System Requirements: Cross-platform (Linux/MacOS/Windows)
Programming language: R
Dependent packages: data.table; jsonlite; ggbeeswarm; ggthemes

# Install packages
if (!requireNamespace("data.table", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("data.table")
}
if (!requireNamespace("jsonlite", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("jsonlite")
}
if (!requireNamespace("ggbeeswarm", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("ggbeeswarm")
}
if (!requireNamespace("ggthemes", quietly = TRUE)) {
  install.packages("ggthemes")
}

# Load packages
library(data.table)
library(jsonlite)
library(ggbeeswarm)
library(ggthemes)

sessioninfo::session_info("attached")

─ Session info ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 setting  value
 version  R version 4.5.2 (2025-10-31)
 os       Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS
 system   x86_64, linux-gnu
 ui       X11
 language (EN)
 collate  C.UTF-8
 ctype    C.UTF-8
 tz       UTC
 date     2026-01-17
 pandoc   3.1.3 @ /usr/bin/ (via rmarkdown)
 quarto   1.8.27 @ /usr/local/bin/quarto

─ Packages ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 package    * version date (UTC) lib source
 data.table * 1.18.0  2025-12-24 [1] RSPM
 ggbeeswarm * 0.7.3   2025-11-29 [1] RSPM
 ggplot2    * 4.0.1   2025-11-14 [1] RSPM
 ggthemes   * 5.2.0   2025-11-30 [1] RSPM
 jsonlite   * 2.0.0   2025-03-27 [1] RSPM

 [1] /home/runner/work/_temp/Library
 [2] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/site-library
 [3] /opt/R/4.5.2/lib/R/library
 * ── Packages attached to the search path.

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Data Preparation

The loaded data are different groups and their data.

# Load data
data <- data.table::fread(jsonlite::read_json("https://hiplot.cn/ui/basic/beeswarm/data.json")$exampleData$textarea[[1]])
data <- as.data.frame(data)

# convert data structure
data[, 1] <- factor(data[, 1], levels = unique(data[, 1]))
colnames(data) <- c("Group", "y")

# View data
head(data)

  Group   y
1    G1 5.1
2    G1 4.9
3    G1 4.7
4    G1 4.6
5    G1 5.0
6    G1 5.4

Visualization

# Beeswarm
p <- ggplot(data, aes(Group, y, color = Group)) +
  geom_beeswarm(alpha = 1, size = 0.8) +
  labs(x = NULL, y = "value") +
  ggtitle("BeeSwarm Plot") +
  scale_color_manual(values = c("#e04d39","#5bbad6","#1e9f86")) +
  theme_stata() +
  theme(text = element_text(family = "Arial"),
        plot.title = element_text(size = 12,hjust = 0.5),
        axis.title = element_text(size = 12),
        axis.text = element_text(size = 10),
        axis.text.x = element_text(angle = 0, hjust = 0.5,vjust = 1),
        legend.position = "right",
        legend.direction = "vertical",
        legend.title = element_text(size = 10),
        legend.text = element_text(size = 10))

p

Different colors represent different groups, and dots represent data.