Episode 183 – The Bats and the Bees

Episode 183 Show Notes

Source: Australian Folklore

• This week on MYTH, we’ll head down under for an Aboriginal tale of the dangers of a sweet tooth. You’ll see that bees are pretty oblivious, that honey hunting is serious business, and that it’s gross to use those around you selfishly. Then, in Gods and Monsters, a lizard will learn to be more careful about playing with his boomerangs. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 183, “The Bats and The Bees”.  As always, this episode is not safe for work.
• This story comes once again from Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as Told to the Piccaninnies collected by Mrs. K Langloh Parker in 1896. Once upon a time, Narahdarn the bat wanted honey. Whether he’s actually a bat or that’s just a name or nickname is unclear, but I’ll assume he’s actually a bat. He wanted it real bad but it wasn’t like he could just flap on over to the store to pick some up. That only left him one real source for his honey hankering: Warranunnah, the bee. Thus it was that he found himself stalking his buzzing little neighbor to watch where he went. I say he here because that’s what the story uses even though most of the bees in a hive (and all of the workers) are actually female. He watched the little bee flit around until it landed and then he struck. Quick as lightning, he stuck a white feather between Warranunnah’s back legs. That’s not what you expected, right? Like, where did a bat get a feather from? Does he just carry that around? His plan did make a certain amount of sense though. He knew that Warranunnah made honey somewhere but not where. A tiny bee is easy to lose as it zips around, but a giant white feather wandering through the air is much easier to spot. 
• He could follow the bee now, but just knowing where the honey was wouldn’t help much. Thus he ordered his two wives to follow after him with wirrees (canoe-shaped containers) to carry the honey home in. The trio followed poor hapless Warranunnah (who somehow didn’t notice three fucking bats following his every move or the feather many times his own size stuck between his fucking legs) all damned day. His stinger must be huge. Anyway, night fell and still the restless bee had not returned home. Afraid of losing their quarry in the night, Narahdarn thought quick. Snatching up a piece of bark from a nearby tree, the bat trapped Warranunah under it to keep him from buzzing away. The bat trio was thus able to get some sleep without worrying about missing out on that sweet, sweet honey. Maybe I’m biased since I’m not a fan of honey, but this seems like an awful lot of work for just a sweet treat.
• Morning came and, when it was light enough to see clearly again, Narahdarn released the trapped bee to fly away again. Warranunnah seems to be blessed with an absence of excess thoughts and, despite his recent predicament, saw nothing amiss. And he somehow still hadn’t noticed that damned feather. It took some more aimless wandering but, in time, the bee did finally return to his hive hidden in the boughs of a gunnyanny tree (which I believe is a eucalyptus tree). Narahdarn took out his comebo (a style of knife as far as I can tell) and used it to mark the tree so that he would know it again. I don’t know if the tree’s leaves were just especially thick or if maybe the hive’s location in a cleft in the tree’s branches was especially deep or something. It doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to spot the tree with a beehive in it when you already know where it is, but I haven’t exactly spent a lot of time honey hunting, so maybe I’m wrong. I do still wonder if our intrepid bat has a utility belt full of helpful gadgets, given how many unusual items he just happens to have on him at all times. 
• Having thus marked the tree, Narahdarn returned to his two wives, who were lagging behind, burdened as they were by the wirrees they carried. He’d done his part in locating the secret golden treasure – now it was up to them to climb the tree and retrieve it. I find myself wondering why bats would need to climb a tree and I’m realizing that the story never actually says that Narahdarn’s wives are also bats. In fact, it uses the term ‘women’ to describe them, so I’m forced to conclude that this bat is married to human women. I don’t know which is worse – a normal sized bat with human wives or a human-sized bat. Leaving that nightmare fuel aside for the moment. He urged them to hurry up, hankering for his honey, but I notice that he didn’t offer to help out with their burdens at all to speed things up. Typical, really.
• Without complaint, the two wives did as they were bid. One of the women readied the wirree while the other shimmied up the marked tree. As she reached the place where the trunk split out into countless branches, Naradharn called out for her to reach her hand into the tree’s crotch for the honey. Which feels vaguely sexual in a really wrong way. She did so but it was a tight fit and she had to work to get her hand in. You might already see the problem here. There was no way for the poor woman to pull her hand back out with the honey in it. Panicking, she dropped the golden goodness and tried to extricate her empty hand, but she still couldn’t seem to pull it back out. 
• Terrified and more than a little uncomfortable, she called down to her husband for help. Grumbling, the bat climbed up to help her (so apparently the bats still need to climb for some reason). He examined her hand and came to the awful conclusion that there was simply no way to remove it from the tree. He was going to have to cut her hand off. Naradharn knew that his wife would have some very loud and very reasonable objections to this plan, so he drew his comebo and, before the woman could see what he was planning, he hacked her fucking hand off without her knowledge or consent. Her shock at both the betrayal and the actual physical trauma was enough to kill the poor woman outright and her lifeless body collapsed into the branches, still bleeding from the hacked off stump. 
• Naradharn carried her corpse back down to the ground where his other wife (who was also the dead woman’s sister for extra trauma) was waiting. “Your sister is dead but I still don’t have any honey. Get your ass up the tree, chop out the severed hand I cut off your sister right before she died completely coincidentally and through no fault of mine) and then get me that honey. Now, woman!” Yeah, he’s not a good husband or a good person. Bat. Whatever. The remaining wife had some understandable objections to this terrible, terrible plan. She knew that her husband would have no interest in hearing most of them, so she settled on the one that was most likely to be of interest to Naradharn. “Surely the honey is gone by now! You caused such a commotion by, you know, murdering my sister with your amateur surgery, that surely the bees have carried it away somewhere safe by now. 
• If she’d been hoping that her husband might feel some touch of grief or remorse for the wife he had killed with his reckless single-mindedness, she was sadly mistaken. Naradharn cared only for his obsessive need for honey. “Nope, that didn’t happen. I have nothing to counter your argument with except my own male arrogance, but that’s enough for me. Get your ass up that tree and get the honey your sister died for.” The surviving wife went back to those many, many objections she had and tried every excuse she could think of to avoid going up into the tree that had just resulted in her sister’s death. Rather than swaying her husband with concern for her, it only infuriated him that his desire for honey was once again being thwarted. He pulled out his boondi (a heavy club that could be thrown to hunt down game) and threatened her with it. “Either you go cut out your dead sister’s hand and get me my honey, or I’ll send you to join her.” 
• Crying now, the surviving sister scrambled up the tree. She tried to remove the severed hand that was plugging up the honey hole, but she only succeeded in getting her own hand stuck in the tight space with it. That had to be terrifying and horrifying for a number of reasons. Naradharn watched her from the ground and so he recognized that she too had gotten stuck. His wife started crying and struggling harder as he scrambled up the tree to see what the situation was. He tried pulling her arm back out but, like her sister’s, it wouldn’t budge. With a heavy sigh, he drew his comebo again. Ignoring his wife’s terrified pleading, he hacked her hand off at the wrist as well. After one great shriek, she fell silent, which Naradharn was grateful for. “I guess I’ll have to do this myself. Climb back down and I’ll cut out the honey.” His wife didn’t move to obey or say anything in response. Looking closer, he saw that she too was dead from the shock. 
• Looking this second corpse in the eyes scared him. One dead wife could be an accident (it wasn’t) but two was clearly murder. He quickly scrambled back out of the gunnyanny tree with her body and laid it in the dust beside her sister’s corpse. Honey didn’t seem so important anymore – a realization that I really wish he’d come to before he murdered two women in cold blood. Abandoning them there, Naradharn fled the scene of the crime and, hopefully, his guilt. 
• He returned to camp alone. As he approached, the younger sisters of his two now-dead wives rushed out to greet him. Or, more accurately, to greet their beloved sisters who they assumed would be with him. They were also hoping for a taste of the honey they all knew that he had set out to get the day before. They were confused and concerned to find that Naradharn travelled alone. Looking at him more closely, they saw that his arms were covered in blood and that his expression looked tense and furious. Something bad had clearly happened. The two dead women and their sisters all belonged to the Bilbers, as did their mother who came out at the sound of her daughters’ raised voices. “What has happened, Naradharn? Where are my daughters? They left with you yesterday to go and seek out the honey you just had to have. Today you return with no honey and no wives. Your face looks like someone ready to murder the next person to upset you and your arms are covered in a really concerning amount of blood. Tell me, Naradharn – where are my daughters?”
• The bat refused to look at her. “Don’t ask these questions of me, Bilber. Go and ask Wurranunnah the bee. Maybe he knows something, but Naradharn the bat knows nothing.” Which is a pretty suspicious fucking answer. She and her surviving daughters all peppered the new widower with questions, but he wrapped himself in silence like a cloak and refused to answer anything else. More concerned than ever, the mother left the silent bat to his brooding and returned to her dardurr, her house, and told the members of her own tribe her suspicions about her son-in-law. “My daughters are gone and Narahdarn, their husband, will say nothing of what happened to them. He says he knows nothing, but he returned from an expedition to find honey with his arms covered in blood. He surely has a tale to tell and I more than suspect he did something to them.”
• The chief of this tribe listened to the Bilbers’ mother with empathy. It was a hell of a story, but she was known for being honest and down-to-earth, so he had every reason to believe her. She finished telling of her suspicions and fell to weeping and wailing for her missing daughters who she correctly feared she would never see again. “Mother of the Bilbers, I shall look into your claim. If anything has happened to them and Naradharn had anything to do with it, I will bring vengeance down on his head like a thunderbolt. His tracks are still fresh and the young men of our tribe are excellent trackers. They shall follow his steps back to where he has come from and discover what he is hiding.” With a gesture, he sent the young hunters to begin the journey. “They will return swiftly with what they learn. Once they do, we shall hold a corrobboree (a traditional ceremony). If he is guilty, he will be punished there.”
• The mother of the missing women bowed her head, tears still streaming down her cheeks. “Thank you, cousin. It helps a little to know that my daughters will have justice.” She looked up to see the young hunters setting out, having gathered their supplies. “Go with speed, young men. Hurry lest the rain fall or the dust blow and hide the tracks that you must follow. And thank you!” They bowed to her and then set off. The fleetest footed and keenest eyed young men had taken up this task, and they raced like the wind along the trail that Naradharn had left. The bat had made no real effort to disguise his passage, so they soon found the grisly scene he had left beneath the gunnyanny tree. They examined the bodies, the tree, and the severed hands still trapped there, and then they raced back to camp to report.
• That night, the corrobboree was held as the chief had promised. The women sat in a half-circle around the fire. They chanted hypnotically, keeping the beat by banging two boomerangs together or by beating rolled up rugs. More fires were lit on the edge of the scrub, throwing light on the dancers as they moved sinuously out of their camps. They were painted in all manner of designs, with waywahs around their waists (a waistband made of possum sinews and strips of paddymelons) and feathers in their hair. The dancers carried painted wands in their hands as they moved. At the head of the procession of the men dancing into a clearing before the women was Narahdarn. 
• Corrobborees are a time when the people could connect to the Dreamtime and the spirits that dwelt there. The fires lit up the tops of the trees, picking out the dark shapes of balahs, powerful spirits with strange, changing forms. The chanting and beating grew louder as the dancers approached the center of the clearing. The flames licked the tops of the trees and still more wood was added to make them rage higher. Towards the largest fire danced the men, forcing Narahdarn at their head to move towards it as well. 
• Out of the darkness, above the beating and chanting, wailed the voice of the grieving mother, accusing her son-in-law of murdering her daughters. The balahs pressed closer to the fires, their impossible shapes looming and twisting with the flickering shadows. Narahdarn turned to move safely away from the towering inferno but found a mass of dancing men blocking his path. As one, they seized the murderer and hurled him into the madly leaping fire. He screamed as his skin charred, his fat melted, and his lungs burned. He died there in the flames for his crimes, and the Bilbers were avenged. 
• And that’s how the story ends. It initially feels like it’s going to be a fun story of why bats fly at night or something, but instead it’s just a tale of vicious murder by a callous husband who cares more for his own sweet tooth than the lives of his wives. It’s a dark story, but it’s also viscerally satisfying to see someone punished so swiftly and thoroughly for their misdeeds. There is however a very short story of that type about Wurrunnunnah the bee, who kind of got short shrift in this story. This one comes from Australian Legendary Tales collected by K. Langloh Parker in 1896.
• Long, long ago, before the cruelty of Narahdarn, the Wurrunnunnahs and the Bunnyyarls were related families who lived in the same camp. The Wurrunnunnahs were diligent and hard-working while the Bunnyyarls were lazy and short sighted. The former family was constantly trying to gather food, storing up supplies to last them through a time of famine should it be necessary. The Bunnyyarls, on the other hand, couldn’t be assed to help out. They never thought about the future, and frequently picked through the garbage of the other families in camp for anything they were short of. Thrifty but kind of gross considering that the rubbish in question includes a lot of rotting meat. 
• One day, the Wurrunnunnahs asked the Bunnyyarls to come with them on an expedition. “We’re going out to gather honey from the flowers. Winter is coming, I can feel it on the breeze. Soon the flowers will be blown away on icy winds and there will be no more honey to gather.” The Bunnyyarls just laughed in their faces. “Fuck that shit. You go gather honey or whatever awful labor you want to do. We’ll be hanging here and looking after things.” They laughed again, knowing that they would be able to just share in whatever the Wurrunnunnahs brought back without having to do any of the work. Sighing, the Wurrunnunnahs left to gather the honey alone, leaving those assholes the Bunnyyarls to their garbage games. They gathered honey from the flowers and, when they were done, they found a new place to store it. They never returned back to the camp, abandoning their lazy cousins. In time, the busy Wurrunnunnahs were changed into the busy little bees of the modern day and the lazy Bunnyyarls became the flies that eat garbage to this very day.
• This second short tale reminds me a lot of Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper. Or, as you may have experienced it as a child the Pixar movie A Bug’s Life. And so, as the guilty burn and the lazy roll in filth, it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s careless critter is Oolah the lizard.
• This story also comes from Australian Legendary Tales collected by K. Langloh Parker. Once upon a time, Oolah the lizard was bored bored bored. He’d spent all day lying in the sun doing nothing, as lizards are wont to do, and he couldn’t stand the thought of wasting any more time sunbathing. He was BORED! Stretching, he scrambled off the rock. “I’ll go play. That’ll be more fun than just sitting here.” He pulled his boomerangs out (from under the rock I assume) and began to practice throwing them. 
• As Oolah was practicing his technique, along came Galah, an Australian bird. Galah was fascinated by this, and stood nearby watching the lizard making throw after throw. I don’t know if any of you have ever tried to throw a boomerang so that it actually comes back, but it’s a difficult skill to master. It also only works with a certain type of boomerang, known as bubberahs, but luckily those were the variety that our lizard friend was using. They are smaller and more curved than the variety meant to fly in a straight line. 
• Oolah enjoyed having an audience and he began to show off a little, preening under the attention. He began to throw just a little harder and with a little more zing to really show off. Galah oohed and aahed appropriately and so Oolah puffed up his chest and threw one with all his might and a little extra twist. It whizzed through the air and came soaring back almost too fast to see. It flew wider than the others had, swinging around to catch Galah right in the fucking head. She tried to duck, so instead of shattering her skull, it simply shaved off the top of her head, feathers and skin both. With a hideous cawing and a croaking shriek, she leapt into the air in pain, stopping every few minutes to knock her head against the ground in a desperate attempt to stop the agony.
• Oolah missed catching his boomerang and simply stared in horror at the bloody mess he had made in his pride. Watching the blood streaming from poor Galah’s head made him sick and terrified, so he ran away and hid under a bindeah, or a thorn bush. Galah saw the lizard flee and, infuriated by what had happened to her and still in blinding agony, she gave chase. Still shrieking, she followed him under the bush and seized him in her beak.  Still making that awful sound, she raked Oolah along the brambles until each and every thorn had torn a hole in his flesh. Then she rubbed his mangled flesh across her own still-bleeding scalp. “That’ll show you to be careless, Oolah! From this day on, you’ll carry thorns on you always and be stained with my blood.”
• Now angry and in his own terrible agony, Oolah hissed at the bird. “That’s gonna go both ways, asshole! That was an accident but since you decided to curse me, I’m gonna curse you right back. From now on, you shall always have a bald-ass head for as long as I am a blood-stained lizard!” Now if you’ve never seen a Galah bird, they have a unique crest that they can raise up, revealing their bald head underneath to this very day. Likewise, the lizards in that area are covered in spikes like the prickles of a bindeah and are colored a reddish-brown like old blood. 
• That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated.  Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on TuneIn, on Vurbl, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Instagram as MythsYourTeacherHatedPod, on Tumblr as MythsYourTeacherHated, and on Bluesky as MythsPodcast.  You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line.  I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated.  The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff. 
• Next time, we’ll travel back to the ancient kingdom of Manipur to watch a couple of pigeons try to throw a proper feast. You’ll learn that birds get up to some cool shit, that event planning has always been a pain, and that old people (and birds) can throw down with the best of them. Then, in Gods and Monsters, a serpent god with antlers will inspire a boat and compete to rule the universe. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.