The workers in any RTS are a core part of the game, though in Battle Aces they mostly did their own thing - you just have to worry about keeping them alive. We initially wanted to have them permanently connected to the core via hoses, and Cuevas mocked up a fun birth animation to have them fly out from the Core when respawning - but it ended up being considerably cleaner to have them be a bit more hand-wavy.
The original mosquito design was fun but ended up being a bit busy when you had 20-40 of them around your base, so we tried to keep the later designs simpler and focused on one main 'mining' animation or effect.