It is primitively eusocial, not showing the same bias in brood care seen in other social insects with greater asymmetry in relatedness.

[1][2] The species employs a variety of colony founding strategies, sometimes with single founders and sometimes in groups of variable number.

The species R. travancorica, once thought separate, was determined synonymous with R. marginata after intensive specimen comparisons in 1989.

[8] Females are hard to distinguish morphologically except for their level of ovary development, which generally increases with their age.

[9] Females are the default workers of R. marginata, but they may also rise to queenship by taking over a resident queen, founding a new colony, or adopting an abandoned one.

The mechanism by which the next-in-line-queen is chosen is cryptic; neither age nor dominance accurately predicts the successor.

However, the queen in R. marginata is a "docile sitter" who does not use physical aggression to maintain her reproductive monopoly in the colony.

It has been experimentally demonstrated that males of R. marginata have the ability to feed larvae, but they do not because they lack food access and females do not give them an opportunity to do so in natural populations.

[9] The nests are made of paper, which are produced by wasps masticating cellulose and mixing it with saliva.

The distribution of R. marginata extends as far west as Pakistan and as far east as New Guinea, Queensland, and some eastern Pacific islands.

[9] Although R. marginata has been studied extensively in India, there is a lack of literature about the animal in other parts of its range.

[3] The amount of time it takes for a brood to fully develop is highly variable and is complicated by occurrences of nest cannibalism, which is often undetected as replacement eggs appear.

Age has been shown to be the determining factor for whether the resident wasps react with hostility or tolerance.

Age might be an indicator of ovarian development (reproductive threat) or of other important qualities such as plasticity for role specialization.

[7] Aggression in the form of chasing and sometimes stinging is needed to defend the nests from predators and non-nestmates.

Among the workers, the dominance hierarchy does not relate to reproductive competition or accurately predict individuals to take over queenship.

[21] Discriminating nestmates from non-nestmates is dependent on acquiring and encountering odors from the nest post-eclosion.

[24] With experience, they acquire a vivid familiarity with their foraging range; they perhaps remember the sites from where they have collected food previously.

[8] R. marginata, however, have increasingly unrelated workers and broods because of "simultaneous production of several different patrilines and matrilines within a colony.

"[3] Serial polygyny works against the inclusive fitness benefits workers have of caring for broods because of reduced relatedness.

[11] The researchers ultimately found, "R. marginata queens mate with 1–3 different males and the average relatedness among their daughters thus drops from the theoretically expected 0.75 to about 0.50, thus entirely negating the advantage of haplodiploidy for social evolution, as predicted by Hamilton" (851).

R. marginata however show no indication of discriminating against nestmates for mate choice in both males and females.

[8] Vespa tropica, a hornet species, is a key predator of R. marginata brood in Indian populations.

[3][8] As a predator avoidance strategy, nests are often built to only be accessible through small openings, thus, preventing hornets from getting through.