Animals across taxa and habitats are known to use available space nonrandomly.

They are known to concentrate their space use around locations rich

in food, mates or refuges. There could also be cascading effects of such

disproportionate use for the individual itself, its conspecifics or even the

landscape it inhabits. In addition to using their habitats non-randomly for

foraging, avoiding predators and optimizing homing routes; some social insects

were also discovered to use their nest space non-randomly. We tested if the

primitively eusocial paper wasp Ropalidia marginata used its nest space nonrandomly

and indeed found a majority of individuals using parts of the nest

more intensively than expected by chance (spatial fidelity). We tested several

hypotheses that were primarily based on studies on ants, to understand the

relationship between the social and spatial organization of individuals in social

insect colonies. We found that the non-random space use by adults within R.

marginata nests is a result of maximizing nutritional exchange and minimizing

disease spread in the densely populated colonies. In addition, in order to

understand the role of non-random space use by adults on task performance, we

tracked individuals while they performed the task of food distribution, as it is the

most conspicuous and important task in social insect colonies. We found that

wasps within a feeding bout cooperatively (and often repeatedly) fed the

randomly distributed larvae, thus minimizing the chances of any larvae going

hungry. Each wasp that fed larvae in a feeding bout optimized its feeding route

by minimizing the distance per unit larvae it fed. We conclude that

understanding the spatial organization of adults might help us better understand

the mechanism of efficient division of labour on social insect nests.