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Meaning

Excellent – the highest quality.

Origin

Hard to tell if we need an etymologist or an entomologist for this one.

Bees carry pollen back to the hive in sacks on their legs. It is tempting to explain this phrase as alluding to the concentrated goodness to be found around the bee’s knee. There’s no evidence for this explanation though. It is sometimes said to be a corruption of ‘business’, but there’s no evidence to support that either.

Nor is there any connection with another phrase, ‘a bee’s knee’. In the 18th century this was used as a synonym for smallness, but has since disappeared from the language:

Mrs. Townley Ward – Letters, June 1797 in N. & Q. “It cannot be as big as a bee’s knee.”

There’s no definitive origin for ‘the bee’s knees’, but it appears to have been coined in 1920s America. The first printed reference to it I can find is in the Ohio newspaper The Newark Advocate, April 1922, under the heading ‘What Does It Mean?’:

“That’s what you wonder when you hear a flapper chatter in typical flapper language. ‘Apple Knocker,’ for instance. And ‘Bees Knees.’ That’s flapper talk. This lingo will be explained in the woman’s page under the head of Flapper Dictionary.” [an ‘apple knocker’ is a rustic]

Clearly the phrase must have been new then for the paper to plan to take the trouble to define it. Disappointingly, they didn’t follow up on their promise and ‘the lingo’ wasn’t subsequently explained. Several U.S. newspapers did feature lists of phrases under ‘Flapper Dictionary’ headings. Although ‘bee’s knees’ isn’t featured, they do show the time as being a period of quirky linguistic coinage. For example, from one such Flapper Dictionary:

Kluck – dumb person.
Dumb kluck – worse than a kluck.
Pollywoppus – meaningless stuff.
Fly-paper – a guy who sticks around.

There’s no profound reason to relate bees and knees other than the jaunty-sounding rhyme. In the 1920s it was fashionable to devise nonsense terms for excellence – ‘the snake’s hips’, ‘the kipper’s knickers”, ‘the cat’s pyjamas’, ‘the sardine’s whiskers’ etc. Of these, the bee’s knees and the cat’s pyjamas are the only ones that have stood the test of time. More recently, we see the same thing – the ‘dog’s bollocks’.

The expression “Tie the knot” originated before 1000 AD. It’s exact lingistic origin is unknown but it has roots in both Middle English and Old English. It may refer to the practice of binding the hand of the two people being married with a ribbon, rope or cord. This symbolized their union. This type of hand binding is still practiced in some faiths at wedding ceremonies today.

Replace the word off with the word disembark, as in to get off of a ship, plane or other passenger vehicle. One would disembark from the bus.

One would not typically disembark from a car. It is a smaller vehicle, for personal use not really group travel.

Another explanation would be that English just has many rules and examples that are contradictary.

If something is the “bees knees” that means it is really great.