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The beeswarm plot is a distant cousin of the Scatter Plot. A continuous variable is displayed on the vertical axis and a categorical variable is displayed on the horizontal axis.

The traditional form of this plot is a strip plot, which vertically aligns all the points in a group, often resulting in a significant number of data points overlaying one another.

A random jitter is sometimes employed to reduce these overlays, but it does not guarantee that they will be eliminated entirely. Moreover, many points are moved unnecessarily when using this method.

The beeswarm plot uses a computational algorithm to move data points the minimum distance necessary to avoid overlays with other data points within the same group.

See the Getting Started page for an illustration of how to use the macro.