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The Australian-English slang phrase bee’s dick designates a very small distance or amount.
This phrase (in which the noun dick designates the penis) is perhaps intended as a humorous variant of the phrase bee’s knee, which is used in the singular to designate something small, insignificant or weak.
—Cf. also the Australian-English phrase the ant’s pants.
These are, in chronological order, some of the earliest occurrences of the phrase bee’s dick that I have found:
1-: From Sayings of the Week, published in The Sydney Morning Herald (Sydney, New South Wales, Australia) of Saturday 21st May 1988 [page 28, column 3]:
If I was a second out it would have been easier to accept but I was only a bee’s dick out.
Angus Waddell, after failing to qualify for the Australian Olympic swimming team by one hundredth of a second.
2-: From World Championship Road Race Series: Round 11: Lawson’s the King in French Grand Prix, by Michael Scott, published in Cycle News (Long Beach, California, USA) of Wednesday 2nd August 1989 [page 11, column 1]:
The Australian was working hard with steering geometry changes to get the bike to turn better. Had he succeeded? He gave a typically laconic comment: “It gets better every practice session, but only by a bee’s dick.”
3-: From Death of a River Guide (Ringwood (Victoria): McPhee Gribble Publishers, 1994), by the Australian author Richard Flanagan (born 1961) [chapter 2, page 16]:
My head, jammed between the rocks, can no doubt be made out from the large boulder above. No doubt. The blue of my guide’s helmet and the planes of my face visible to those looking down through these few centimetres. (How many? Seven or eight or nine? What does it avail? I’m a bee’s dick away from those people and that beautiful air they breathe and I can’t reach it or them, or them me.)
4-: From Postcards from the Ledge: Collected Mountaineering Writings of Greg Child (Seattle (Washington): The Mountaineers Books, 1998), by the Australian mountaineer and author Greg Child (born 1957) [Madmen Offering Themselves to the Brink of Disaster: page 79]:
After 2,000 feet of head-over-heels, tumbling free fall, Glenn and Nic’s speed had increased, and the air was thick enough to push against with their hands. They forced their bodies into flat, star-shaped positions. Two hundred feet above the bed of the icy couloir their hands released the pilot chutes and the main chutes ripped out of their packs. Mandy whooped as two yellow spots of parachute nylon burst open. Then everyone shut up as the chutes disappeared behind a massive buttress of rock. They seemed to linger back there for too long. The thought crossed my mind that they had collided with the wall. […] Then they emerged, and Mandy whooped again. Later, when asked how far he had missed the wall by, Glenn would answer, “By a bee’s dick.”
5-: From Bachelor Kisses (London: Pan Books, 1999), by the Northern-Ireland-born Australian novelist Nick Earls (born 1963) [chapter 26, page 226]:
Shane Sandercock, buck’s party survivor and now happily married surgical registrar, calls me shortly before any dinner plan would have taken effect and says, Mate, I’ve got a pretty acute abdomen in Cas, and I think we’ve got to in and take a look.
I meet him in theatre and he’s already standing at the sink and scrubbing, yellow iodine-stained water running from his elbows. I ask him what he thinks it’s likely to be and he says, Perforated duodenal ulcer, I reckon. But we’ll see, won’t we?
[…]
Came within a bee’s dick of something important here, he says […]. What do you reckon that’d be? Gastroduodenal artery? And that’s the closest we get to discussing anatomy.
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