PHILADELPHIA – Using a process that may have implications for infectious disease outbreaks among humans, researchers have fingered a prime suspect in a disorder that is causing massive declines among the nation’s honeybees.

After freezing bees, grinding them up, extracting the DNA and using sophisticated genetic sequencing to identify every organism present, they have settled upon a little-known virus discovered in Israel only three years ago.

There, symptoms of a mysterious bee malady came in the form of shivering wings. Then the bees became paralyzed and died. Thus, the name: Israeli acute paralysis virus, or IAPV.

Researchers don’t know how the virus got here. They don’t know how to cure it. Nor do they know if IAPV alone can account for Colony Collapse Disorder, which has killed tens of billions of bees since last fall.

“What may well be the case is that IAPV alone is not sufficient to cause the disease,” said W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “It may require IAPV plus other stressors,” such as mites, bacteria or other viruses.

All they know is that IAPV was present in bees that had succumbed to the new disorder and that it was not present in healthy bees.

“The only candidate that was left standing at the end of this rigorous analysis was, in fact, IAPV,” Lipkin said.

The scientific breakthrough, published in Friday’s online version of the journal “Science,” came after months of intense research led by Penn State entomologist Diana L. Cox-Foster and the USDA’s Jeffrey Pettis.

It began in the fall, when a western Pennsylvania beekeeper, David Hackenberg, took his bees to Florida to pollinate oranges. But when he opened the hives, the bees were gone.

Since then, Colony Collapse Disorder has affected 23 percent of the nation’s commercial beekeeping colonies, causing losses of 50 to 90 percent.