origin

[joe1]

origin of bees knees please

[jno]

1920s slang, deliberately meaningless - see here

[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. The eel's heels, the gnu's shoes, the cat's whiskers/pyjamas and the elephant's instep are just a few of them.
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. 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.

[joko]

I was under the impression it was to do with the area of the body that the bees carry the pollen from flower to flower, the nectar, the liquid gold - the legs/knees - so therefore the bees knees are the best.

I don't know where i got this from - i may have just invented it, as i wrote a story many years ago in which this was discussed and perhaps i came up with this as an explanation, but i can't recall.

[jno]

'business' is an interesting possibility QM - perhaps bees' knees did indeed come from that and the other nonsense phrases were created later, along similar lines but not as a corruption of real words?

[Quizmonster]

As I said earlier, J, since there's no evidence at all that "the bee's knees" was the earliest - certainly in spoken usage - of these nonsense phrases, there doesn't really seem to be any reason to favour the 'business' source. It seems clear that - whichever one set the ball rolling - the US of A went berserk in trying to find variants! Personally, my favourite is "the gnu's shoes". I don't expect we'll ever know for sure who originated them.

[firefly]

I thought it was from a mock Italian version of 'business'. Certainly there have been more dubious origins to phrases, Quizmonster, it seems to make perfect phonetic sense.

[Quizmonster]

I agree, Firefly, and listed that phonetic similarity in my original response. The problem is that 'the cat's whiskers' - to take just one example from the multitude of other such phrases - has an equally old provenance so far as we can establish. I can see no phonetic similarity between it and anything else, so where did it come from?
As you say, many phrases have distinctly dubious origins and folk etymology is hardly a basis for linguistic explanations. Generations of British quiz-setters, for example, managed to convince themselves and others that 'posh' was an acronym for 'port out starboard home'...but it never was.
Other than the certainty that 'the bee's knees' appeared in the Witwer book I referred to earlier, we simply have no evidence as to its origin. Hence, each of us is free to believe what we like!

[joe1]

Thanks for all the help people.