Yesterday I took some people on my half-day olive oil tour. For an olive oil producer May is a critical month. This is when the olive tree flowers and olives start to form. If the weather conditions are adverse the olive crop can be drastically reduced. The last two years in Spain have seen a fall in the production of olive oil for this reason. Last year we had temperatures up to 40ºC (104ºF) in the south of Spain. When this happened a lot of trees just shed most of their flowers so very few olives were produced. In the photo below, if you look carefully, you can see olives starting to form in the centre of some of the flowers. Pollination mainly happens with the help of the wind and not by bees.