Bee's Knees

[lembo121]

Do bee's have knees?? And what is it about them that are so good? I can understand the "mutts nuts" but bees knees!!

[shammydodger]

I believe the expression "the bee's knees" relates to the fact that bees store the nectar they collect in sacs located on their legs.

[shammydodger]

Or possibly not, having just enlightened myself via the web! See

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml =/arts/2004/05/31/boquin.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004 /05/31/ixartright.html

[Quizmonster]

�The bee's knees', meaning excellent/the very thing/just the job etc is only one of a whole set of silly catch-phrases popular in the USA in the early 1920s. There is a theory that �bee's knees' is a sound corruption of �business' on the basis that �just the business' means �excellent', too. However, the problem is that none of the other phrases listed above - nor the multitude of additional ones - is a corruption of something else. So that is inherently unlikely, too.

[joko]

QM - could it not be that the others came after the original of bees knees - i'd say that makes more sense that some one randomly coming up with all that stuff...

[Quizmonster]

Joko, this is the rest of the answer I tried to post yesterday, but AB was playing up yet again, so I had to keep pruning it until I finished up with the response you see above.
If there were some evidence that �the bee's knees' was the very first of these phrases to appear, it might be possible that the others are merely variants. But there appears to be no such evidence.
The very earliest recorded uses of these in writing are very close in time. �The bee's knees' first emerged in writing in H C Witwer's �Fighting Blood' published at some point in 1923 and the first use of �the cat's whiskers' was in W A Roberts' �Saucy Stories' also published in 1923. Much too close to call a winner!
Both might have been around in speech beforehand, of course, but we will probably never know which was the original. As a result, the �business' connection is dubious at best.
The actress, Clara Bow, usually called "The It Girl", was sometimes nicknamed �The Bee' - a reference to the initial letter of her surname - and she had a beautiful pair of legs, which she took full advantage of in her starring roles. It is claimed by some that the phrase �the bee's knees' was an acknowledgement of her perfect limbs. That is doubtful, too, as she appeared in her very first film in 1922 and her acting was so atrocious that all her scenes were cut! Presumably, Witwer's 1923 book mentioned above was already substantially written before Clara became famous, so that is another highly dubious source.

[alscot]

I did read somewhere years ago that the saying was an abbreviation of "be all and end all" hence "be"s and "e"s hence "bees knees". Not sure of how accurate story is though.

[shammydodger]

Hmmm

Of course, it won't stop the quizmaster at my local asking that question. I'm getting rather disillusioned as regards what I can believe. All my early childhood certainties are being shot down.

I think I'll go back to the Rules of Golf. At least I know they are believable!

[Sphinx_Svens]

i thought it was a (cockney-up) of 'The Business' ... If something is 'the business', it's pretty tip-top.

[alscot]

Here is another explanation:-

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bee1.htm
Origin at same time / place as Quizmonster's first reply--blows my first theory out the water !!!