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Altruism Altruism is a behavior in which an individual, the donor performs an action that helps another individual, the recipient without the donor gaining any advantage. We believe that natural selection should eliminate these characteristics, but there are still numerous examples. In animals today, we can see acts of altruism being performed in honey bees, ants and “the watchman” bird. We also see a special kind of altruistic behavior in vampire bats. (1) A honey bee society is made up of a queen bee and 30,000 – 40,000 workers. Each worker who is a diploid female begins their life as a fertilized egg which is deposited by the queen in a separate wax cell. (The males are haploid and develop from unfertilized eggs.) After the fertilized egg hatches, a white, grublike larva is produced. This larva is fed almost continuously by the nurse workers. After the larva has grown until it fills the cell, the nurses cover the cell with a wax lid. Then, within 12 days the adult bee emerges. (3) After the adult bee begins work, she is a nurse bringing honey and pollen from storage cells to the queen. After becoming a nurse, she begins to produce wax which is secreted from the abdomen and passed forward to expand the co