Beeswarm Charts: Distribution, Clusters, and Outliers

How to use beeswarm charts to see where countries cluster, how much variation exists, and which countries stand apart from the broader pattern.

Beeswarm charts show distribution.

Each dot represents one country, placed along a single indicator scale.

Beeswarm charts are useful when you want to see where countries cluster, how much variation exists, and whether some countries stand apart from the broader pattern.

Here, the chart shows life expectancy at birth across countries.

Grouping the dots by category reveals how distributions differ across groups.

In this chart, we have grouped Life Expectancy at Birth by Income Group.

Here, countries are grouped by income level, showing a clear gradient in life expectancy: high-income countries cluster at higher values, low-income countries at lower values, and middle-income countries fall between them with greater variation.

Reference lines add a benchmark.

Here, we added a World reference line to compare each income group against the global average.

Most high-income countries are above the World line, while most low-income and lower-middle-income countries fall below it. This view makes the income pattern easier to visualize without changing the underlying chart.