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. Furthermore, they found that insects that had fed on an infected plant for an hour were able to spread the disease to uninfected plants. These findings suggest that the insects become virulent very shortly after feeding on infected plants. The study also found that as time of feeding on infected plants increased, the numbers of viral particles in the gut, hemocoel and salivary glands of the insects also increased, even though there were individual differences in the amounts of BMCTV particles detected in the body. 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. The authors propose that this indicates that MBCTV is unable to replicate within its vector. It was also found that the virus is not transmitted between generations of beet leafhoppers from adults to nymphs, proposing that the virus does not use transovarial transmission.