The wikipedia article on b-trees suggests a variety of possibilities for the etymology, "binary" not really being one of them:
After a talk at CPM 2013 (24th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, Bad Herrenalb, Germany, June 17–19, 2013), Ed McCreight answered a question on B-tree's name by Martin Farach-Colton saying: "Bayer and I were in a lunch time where we get to think a name. And we were, so, B, we were thinking… B is, you know… We were working for Boeing at the time, we couldn't use the name without talking to lawyers. So, there is a B. It has to do with balance, another B. Bayer was the senior author, who did have several years older than I am and had many more publications than I did. So there is another B. And so, at the lunch table we never did resolve whether there was one of those that made more sense than the rest. What really lives to say is: the more you think about what the B in B-trees means, the better you understand B-trees."[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=B-tree#Etymology