How to add labels to sets of seaborn boxplot - matplotlib

Question

I have 2 sets of boxplots, one set in blue color and another in red color. I want the legend to show the label for each set of boxplots, i.e.
Legend:
-blue box- A, -red box- B
Added labels='A' and labels='B' within sns.boxplot(), but didn't work with error message "No artists with labels found to put in legend. Note that artists whose label start with an underscore are ignored when legend() is called with no argument". How do I add the labels?
enter image description here
code for the inserted image:
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
x = list(range(1,13))
n = 40
index = [item for item in x for i in range(n)]
np.random.seed(123)
df = pd.DataFrame({'A': np.random.normal(30, 2, len(index)),
'B': np.random.normal(10, 2, len(index))},
index=index)
red_diamond = dict(markerfacecolor='r', marker='D')
blue_dot = dict(markerfacecolor='b', marker='o')
plt.figure(figsize=[10,5])
ax = plt.gca()
ax1 = sns.boxplot( x=df.index, y=df['A'], width=0.5, color='red', \
boxprops=dict(alpha=.5), flierprops=red_diamond, labels='A')
ax2 = sns.boxplot( x=df.index, y=df['B'], width=0.5, color='blue', \
boxprops=dict(alpha=.5), flierprops=blue_dot, labels='B')
plt.ylabel('Something')
plt.legend(loc="center", fontsize=8, frameon=False)
plt.show()
Here are the software versions I am using: seaborn version 0.11.2. matplotlib version 3.5.1. python version 3.10.1

Answer 1

The following approach sets a label via the boxprops, and creates a legend using part of ax.artists. (Note that ax, ax1 and ax2 of the question's code are all pointing to the same subplot, so here only ax is used.)
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
x = np.arange(1, 13)
index = np.repeat(x, 40)
np.random.seed(123)
df = pd.DataFrame({'A': np.random.normal(30, 2, len(index)),
'B': np.random.normal(10, 2, len(index))},
index=index)
red_diamond = dict(markerfacecolor='r', marker='D')
blue_dot = dict(markerfacecolor='b', marker='o')
plt.figure(figsize=[10, 5])
ax = sns.boxplot(data=df, x=df.index, y='A', width=0.5, color='red',
boxprops=dict(alpha=.5, label='A'), flierprops=red_diamond)
sns.boxplot(data=df, x=df.index, y='B', width=0.5, color='blue',
boxprops=dict(alpha=.5, label='B'), flierprops=blue_dot, ax=ax)
ax.set_ylabel('Something')
handles, labels = ax.get_legend_handles_labels()
handles = [h for h, lbl, prev in zip(handles, labels, [None] + labels) if lbl != prev]
ax.legend(handles=handles, loc="center", fontsize=8, frameon=False)
plt.show()
Alternative approaches could be:
pd.melt the dataframe to long form, so hue could be used; a problem here is that then the legend wouldn't take the alpha from the boxprops into account; also setting different fliers wouldn't be supported
create a legend from custom handles