Who We Are?

My name is Jurica Manestar and I am professional graduated beekeeper from Croatia since 2017. At the beginning it was just simple goal,how to get as much possible bigger honey production in hot and hard Croatian Mediterranean climate, based on main coastal honey crop – Salvia officinalis. Salvia officinalis is Mediterranean plant which honey is worldly most collected in Croatia. Thats generate our name SALVIA QUEEN. We started immediately to select our best adopted queens to be the best suited for overwintering, and get ready for Salvia honey crop come s in the End of April. Very soon we achieve that Salvia honey crop come from usual average 15 Kg to 25 Kg per hive. In that journey we developed our J-11 line. Since 2024, we have officially received Croatian Carnica breeder licence from National Carnica breeding organization. OFFICIAL DNA TEST for Carnica purity shows that our J-11 Carnica line is 98.2% pure genetically homeland Carnica. Last few years we collaborate with top Slovenian breeder which genetics finished in USA as part of the Suzan Cobey project “New world Carolinian”. With that genetics, we create our S-11 line, better adopted to continental and mountain cold climate. We also use our INSTRUMENTAL INSEMINATION for our F0 program, and for other queen breeders F0 lines. Since 2022 we use completely ISOLATED MATING STATION which give us even open mated full control. Our second mating station is SEMI-ISOLATED, so we can with over- saturated our drone population, also control mating process.
This way we completed whole circle needed for good queen selection of our original and native Apis mellifera Carnica