the bee’s knees (plural only)
idiom

- something or someone excellent, surpassingly wonderful, or cool

- a highly admired person or thing

The Oxford English Dictionary / Merriam-Webster

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ORIGIN

Bee’s knees is one of the few surviving nonsense expressions stemming from 1920s America, an era characterised by speakeasies (illegal nightclubs), flappers (women who defied conventional behaviour and fashion) and the Charleston dance.

Bee’s knees triggered other animalistic phrases for cool stuff such as: the ant’s pants, cat’s pajamas, snake’s hips, tiger’s spots, monkey’s eyebrows, etc.

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“BEEDIOMS”

- busy bee = bees are famous for being industrious, and the comparison of busy people to bees goes back to at least the 16th century. In 1715, English poet Isaac Watts used the phrase in a moral poem advising against idleness and mischief: “How doth the little busy bee / Improve each shining hour / And gather honey all the day / From every opening flower!”

- spelling bee = a “bee” has referred to a meeting of people who work together to benefit their group since at least the 1700s. The meaning has expanded to include various purposeful gatherings, like the Scripps National Spelling Bee, where brilliant children gather each year to humble American adults by spelling words like stichomythia, onomatopoeia, and logorrhoea.

- put the bee on = to “put the bee on” someone can mean to ask them for money, often with a piteous, please-help-me tale. The term can be traced back to America’s frontier days. Poor churchgoers would organize “bees” — meetings where everyone pitched in — to pay their preachers; donation collectors would have to “put the bee on” those who were less willing to contribute.

- the birds and the bees = there is no better known euphemism for sex education than “the birds and the bees”, which dates back to at least the late 1800s. In a 1928 song, Cole Porter helped immortalize the metaphor: “Birds do it, bees do it”, he sang. “Even educated fleas do it. Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.”

- a bee in one’s bonnet = this idiom, meaning to be preoccupied with an eccentric idea, conjures the agitated, myopic state one would be in if one found a bee was buzzing around inside one’s hat. Centuries ago, having “maggots in your braines” was used similarly.

- make a bee-line = a bee-line is a straight one between two points; making a bee-line typically means to zoom straight toward a place that one needs or desires — like a bathroom or cocktail bar — ignoring everything else along the way. The Oxford English Dictionary links this phrase to the focused line a bee is “supposed instinctively to take in returning to its hive”.

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SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation, say something like:

“Jim thinks Sony’s latest HD flatscreen is simply THE BEE’S KNEES!”

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