RE: Are you dealing with Workerbees?

I will quote Rishi from H-E Discord as he explained great the "job" of Hive-engine witnesses

Basic summary of a witness's job is to validate the blocks by running a node. How much workerbee staked voting for you determine your rank. Top 20(or whatever configuration is at the moment, sometimes it's reduced due to outages requiring a lot of witnesses to resync) witnesses a block in every round, and one non top 20 gets to witness one(how often is determined by stake). Every round, there's one broadcasting witness, whos' the last person in the round to witness a block. They have to send the signatures of at least 14 witnesses(including themselves, and with current config, remember this can/has been lowered during outages) for the round to properly be registered by other nodes and for the witness to not miss the round.

H-E isn't fully decentralized, but I hope it will be someday... At this moment, H-E witness machines are doing validation of transactions only... Full nodes have the complete history of every transaction from the beginning of the Hive-Engine, and light nodes have for the last 30 days (I think it's 30)... Without FULL nodes, I suppose that the whole system could work with 1 "master" node as it was working before implementing the witness system... At this moment, you can imagine full nodes as a "full copy" of the master node...

Most of games/apps on Hive have their own full nodes to run their apps faster... As validation is done by the H-E witness program, you don't have to "operate" with the "main/master" node...

I hope that I have answered to your questions... ;)