Altruism can be explained by natural selection

Is it really altruism or self-preservation?

If a society has rules where helping each other out increases the chance of survival, even if the ultimate purpose of survival, reproduction is disabled for whatever reason, won't the need to survive keep the 'altruistic' behavior going on?

'altruistic' behavior => high chances of survival => high chances of reproduction.

Now even if the downstream purpose is removed, unless there is an inner mechanism that says, "stop surviving because you have stopped reproducing" why would it stop doing things (altruistic behavior, in this case) that would keep its chance of survival high?

If there is such an inner mechanism, we would all die the moment our gonads dry up and not really live till 70s, 80s or 100s.

Its not always that animals or humans do things for others just because they want to help. They end up often "helping" others because they are forced to do and need to do so for their own survival, consider the feudal societies in the past.

The moment a queen bee is destroyed, some of the dormant females start being active regarding their reproduction cycles and compete to become the next queen bee. And its some secretions of the queen bee while its alive which keep the other females dormant regarding their reproduction capabilities and just keep servicing the queen bee.

I Wonder if the researchers considered this perspective?