The leaf hopper is described as a small insect, 3–3.5 mm (0.12–0.14 in) in length, that is often greenish yellow, tan or olive in colour.

[2][4] The leaf hopper may have darker markings on its wings, pronotum, abdomen and head if it has developed during colder temperatures.

Beet leafhoppers are polyphagous generalists which means that they are able to feed on various different types of host (biology) plants.

[2] The fact that these insects migrate during the spring and summer time to cultivated fields also means that they show a lot of variation in their host plant choices by season: feeding on desert weeds in the winter and feeding on cultivated fields in the summer.

[2] The study also found differences in short term and long term feeding preferences where both kinds of leaf hoppers initially settled on beet plants (when observed over a period of 2 days) and later moved to their preferred choices (when observed over 20 days).

[5] Therefore, researchers conducted electrical penetration graph experiments of leaf hoppers in which they wired beet leafhoppers to an EPG machine and characterized the types of waveforms produced.

[5] What was surprising however was that the rate of phloem ingestion in beet leafhoppers is significantly lower than that in other sap feeding insects.

[4] The insects are active in mustard and flixweed plants over winter and females begin laying eggs in March.

[4] The third generation matures to adulthood by early September or October when these insects migrate back to their winter habitats.

[4] This may be partly because other factors like the seasonal availability of beet plants as food, may also impact the number of generations in a year.

[4] Generally, adults that mature during warmer temperatures in the spring and summer time show light green or yellowish colouration.

[4] Some researchers believe that these changes in colouration occur according to the surrounding temperatures of the last leaf hopper instars as this is the stage during which wings develop.

[4] Several studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s have showed that the beet leafhopper is a vector (epidemiology) of the Spiroplasma citri prokaryote which is the causal agent of the Citrus Stubborn Disease.

[6] The researchers suggest that this increased mortality may be as a result of ingesting toxins that are produced either by S. citri itself or by plants defending themselves against the pathogen.

Researchers tested the impacts of modes of acquisition on the latent period of S. citri within the leafhopper and found that insects that had been injected directly with the prokaryote in their gut had the lowest latency period of 10 days followed by leafhoppers who had ingested the pathogen from an infected plant (16 days).

[8] They observed S. citri in the gut as well as the salivary glands of the insects which further proves that the pathogen may be transmitted by the mechanisms described in the studies above.

[8] In particular, researchers observed that S. citri were often found within gut epithelial and salivary gland cells on infected hosts within small membrane bound vesicles.

[8] However the authors also noted how this damage was not as significant as seen in other insects which may suggest that the beet leafhopper may be co-evolving to reduce harm by S. citri pathogens.

In the same study, researchers were able to detect viral particles of MBCTV in beet leafhopper guts after as soon as an hour of feeding on infected plants.

[11] Another important finding of this study was showing that individual insects can maintain MBCTV in their bodies for up to a 30 days after getting infected by it, even though the amount of virus detected does not increase in this period.

Thus, this study further lends credibility to the transmission model that suggests that beet leafhoppers transmit the BCTV when they feed on the phloem sap of healthy plants.

The authors propose that these findings may suggest that the virus can be transmitted very quickly even after only a couple of hours of exposure to the insects.