There's a higher level of relatedness between colony members for ants also. In the robot swarm description a similar high level of relatedness occured between the co-operating bots.
An 'us' vs 'them' setup where you have closely related entities in a group, and several groups of entities further away genetically, in inter-group competition, seems to be a good bet for an 'altruism-friendly' environment - if a canni evolves, the tribe is compromised and gets usurped by a non-canni tribe.
So mimicing this in DB would prehaps be several colonies of dependant (on others in the colony) bots with epigenetic conspec recognition (which allows for colony reproduction), competing for limited resources.
A 'simple' and less genetically fragile antbot of some sort might give interesting results when evolved, where there's another meta-level above the level of a bot - in this case a colony.