"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 19/12/17 (busy as a bee, bee's knees)

I have bees for you today. Bees being the symbol of Manchester and obviously we're very close to Manchester, but also I went to visit some friends the other day who have a lot of hives and it got me thinking about all the idioms to do with bees in our language. So start with "busy as a bee", wich is a fairly obvious one. Bees are famous for their hard work - pathering pollen, tending to the quine, cooling the hive etc. But what is really surprising about this phrase is how old it is. It goes all the way back to the 1300s and we know this because it was used in Chauser's Canterbury Tale. So incredibly old, 700 years so far and still going strong. And the one we all think of, "the bee's knees". If something is bee's knees, it'a acme of excallence, really. This is just a jesting touch of nonsense, really, with good alliteration thrown in. There are so many quirky coinages which I often turn to on Countdown. Lots of wonderfull ones - canary's tusks, flea's eyebrows, bullfrog's beard, cuckoo's chin, kipper's knickers, caterpillar's kimono, and my favourite, the elephant's adenoids. So it's simply a nonsense phrase, but we love it.