It was discovered by German astronomer Karl Reinmuth at the Heidelberg Observatory on 20 October 1920 and given the provisional designations A920 UA and 1920 HX.

[2] Begonia is a non-family asteroid of the main belt's background population when applying the hierarchical clustering method to its proper orbital elements.

Due to his many discoveries, Karl Reinmuth submitted a large list of 66 newly named asteroids in the early 1930s.

[5][11] In March 2005, a rotational lightcurve of Begonia was obtained from photometric observations by French amateur astronomers Laurent Bernasconi, Raymond Poncy and Silvano Casulli.

[6][7][8] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link adopts the results from IRAS, that is, an albedo of 0.0456 and a diameter of 69.21 km based on an absolute magnitude of 9.77.