As I was chatting with Timmy Danos and Donna Ferrante (see my word tasting notes on free rein and horse idioms), Maury at last appeared, holding a Bellini.
“Where have you been?” I said.
“Sorry,” Maury said. “I was making a beeline for the blinis.”
“There’s a nice New York subway reference,” Timmy said to Donna.
“Blinis?” Maury said. “I mean, the B line ends at Brighton Beach, but…”
“And it makes a straight line down to it through Brooklyn, express, skipping the long queue of local Q line stops.” Timmy said. “And it was inaugurated as an express line in Manhattan. The B-line beeline.”
“That may well B,” Maury said, trusting everyone would hear the pun, “but I can’t think anyone would name a highway in Florida after a New York subway.”’
“Highway?” Donna said.
“It’s officially the Beachline now,” I said, “but until 2005, Florida State Road 528 was named the Bee Line, so named because it goes straight from Orlando to Canaveral with no curves for more than 20 miles.”
“It’s not as though there are no New Yorkers in Florida,” Timmy said. He took a sip from his highball of Blanton’s.
“But beelines owe nothing to New York,” Maury said, “any more than to Berlin or Ljubljana. Leaving aside that the New York train was not called the B until 1967, the same year as the Beeline Expressway opened, the etymology of beeline is entomology: a bee, and not a B.” He tried to gesture to indicate the difference in words. “We’ve had beeline in the language since the earlier 1800s, referring to an apian trajectory through the air.”
“Don’t bees just kind of… buzz around, from flower to flower?” Donna said. “Seems more like a cruise than a direct route.”
“Right until it’s loaded with pollen and wants to go home,” Maury said. “Then it skips the stops.”
“Speaking of which,” I said. A yellow and black insect was making straight for Maury’s Bellini. “That doesn’t belong here.”
Maury looked up and flinched. “Then I won’t be long here either!” He made a move barely describable in Labanotation trying to ward off the bug. Alas, this only enabled it to sting him, leaving a blain. I won’t transcribe under my own byline what he bellowed – let’s just say it was an f-line.
Sesquiotica 
As a regular driver on Arizona’s Beeline Highway for 36 years, I wanted your readers to know the following, courtesy of Wikipedia:
State Route 87 (SR 87) is a 272.66-mile (438.80 km) north–south highway that travels from I-10 near Picacho northward to State Route 264 near Second Mesa.
In the 1930s Harvey Bush championed a highway from Mesa to Payson, crossing the Mazatzal Mountains, which became known as the Bush Highway. In the 1950s a cutoff was built between Mesa and the Saguaro Lake turnoff, bypassing a slow section of the Bush Highway and shortening the trip by 15 minutes. This cutoff was dubbed the Beeline Highway, and the name gradually came to apply to the entire route.