Altruism/ Kin Selection

Altruism/kin selection “Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today (James Dean)!” By this being said ants and bees are there to protect and provide for the queen at any means necessary. This is where altruism and kin selection play a huge role in the lives of bee’s and ants. Kin selection and Altruism is equal with social insects to dominate many terrestrial habitats that they can hardly describe it as colony of organisms because the individuals appear to operate as a unit that is dedicated to the perpetuation and reproduction of the colony as a whole. Altruism and Kin selection vary in many ways. There are small colonies with only a few individuals and then there are some with thousands or even millions of individuals. Colonies may begin by single individual or by a large cohort of a parent colony. In some bee’s and ant colonies they are short lived or seasonal, but they may persist for many years. Bees and ants colonies consist of both sexes; however, others are entirely females. Since the Hymenoptera (ants and bees) are haplodiploid, the diploid female produces from fertilized eggs and haploid males from unfertilized eggs (David C. Queller and Joan E. Strassmann). They have a society that is similar to one another when it comes to reproductive division of labor. The insects have only one or a few reproductive, called queens. The individual are workers that specialize in foraging, defending, and carrying for the young. However, they may or may not be morphologically distinct from the reproducing caste (Queller and Strassmann). Kin selection and altruism is widely important according to William D. Hamilton, he generalized it, quantified it, and was the first to argue that it was important. They formalize the obvious point that helping relatives is advantageous, whereas harming them is not. Basically it explains how to look over situations in which there are tradeoffs between help and harm, for instance like with the bees and ants,

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