Your VM may be using its loopback address for the connection to the local Apache server. If Bro is listening on eth0 (not the loopback interface) it won’t see that traffic.
As for the curl’ing of external sites, have you tried something basic like tcpdump just to make sure packets are moving? I’d also try running the Bro binary, without broctl, on an interface just to make sure Bro is compiled, happy, and seeing packets move.
-AK