I fixed this problem I was having by converting format from POSIXlt to POSIXct as Hadley suggests above – one line of code:
mydata$datetime<-strptime(mydata$datetime, "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S") # original conversion from datetime string : > class(mydata$datetime) [1] "POSIXlt" "POSIXt"
mydata$datetime<-as.POSIXct(mydata$datetime) # convert to POSIXct to use in data frames / ddply