For the beet leafhopper, understanding feeding is important as feeding is a mechanism through which insect borne plant diseases spread. So far, the beet leafhopper is the only known vector of the Beet curly top virus, which spreads through plant phloem tissues. 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. The data showed that beet leafhoppers primarily ingested phloem sap along with xylem and mesophyll sap. What was surprising however was that the rate of phloem ingestion in beet leafhoppers is significantly lower than that in other sap feeding insects. This leads researchers to believe that beet leafhoppers are unable to use the natural turgor pressure of phloem sap in order to ingest fluid and may need to use muscles to actively draw sap from phloem.