I have noticed that every follower I get will default to using a hunting bow at range, instead of the bows I give them. I tried pickpocketing them but they don't even HAVE one. Is it just a graphic glitch or are they just refusing to use the bows I give them? I noticed if I don't give them a melee weapon,t hey equip my bow but that is the only way.

I'm pretty sure this is a bug. I've been having inconsistencies with my follower and bows too.

It's seems that they completely ignore Daedric Bows altogether. As for all the other bows, I've found it really depends on the arrows that you give them and vice versa. I've found if you give them an arrow that is a "grade" higher than the bow, they will default to the hunting bow and use the better arrows. This can go the other way around too. For example if you give them a dwarven bow and glass arrows, they'll take out their hunting bow and use the glass arrows. If you give them a glass bow and drawven arrows, they'll use the glass bow with iron arrows.

I've only found this true with Argis, and to be honest, I don't look at it with a microscope, so I may not be totally right. This is just from casual observation.

You don't have to pickpocket your followers to see what they have, you know.

Yeah, they're kinda like kids (or us from our parents' view) ... They have their own minds and only do what they want!

I haven't had this happen. I do think that if you give them like 3 arrows, they'll last forever. Either that, or I'm wrong and they are using forever-iron-arrows lol.

As far as I now if you give followers better arrows they only use their default bow. If you make sure no arrows are in their inventory they will shoot the bow you give them with iron arrows.

T hey use anything up to dwemer bows. At first I was annoyed but when upgraded heavily it is a small difference to daedric. I still hope it's a bug and not intentional

I had this problem too at first and the hunting bow was not showing up in his inventory. Well I just gave him legendary elven bow when I replaced all other parts of his gear. After a few battles I saw him using the elven bow and saw that he throw away the default hunting bow. Since that he has had always the best bow I have gave to him.

The Drainspell Bow is the only one I've managed to get Aela to use - she doesn't revert back to her original bow

Ive found stripping them with the console, killing, then resurrect them to fix this. As long as you give them something that they would actually use. Erandur was doing this for me, and this fixed it.